FALCONER ON THE AMERICAN FOSSIL ELEPHANT. 
85 
The metropolitan collections furnish excellent and authentic 
materials for testing the accuracy of this statement in two magnifi¬ 
cent skulls of adult wild Elephants, both killed in combat by gun¬ 
shot wounds. The one (No. 2656, Osteol. Cat.) is preserved in the 
Museum of the College of Surgeons, the other in the Zoological 
Department of the British Museum. The former is of a large Cey¬ 
lon Elephant, which bears the open canals (one of them nine inches 
deep) of three bullet wounds, of old date, that had been repaired by 
nature, in addition to its recent death-wounds ; the latter, of a most 
destructive Solitary, or ‘ Goondah ’ wild Elephant, which, for a long 
time was the terror of a district, near which I then resided. It was 
killed in the jungles, on the banks of the Granges, at no great dis¬ 
tance from Meerut, in May, 1833, by a party of four experienced 
sportsmen, who went out for the express purpose of killing it. The 
savage animal made no fewer than twenty-three desperate and gallant 
charges against a battery of at least sixteen double-barreled guns, to 
which it was exposed on each occasion, and fell, after several hours, 
with its skull literally riddled with bullets. Besides the shot holes 
of its last engagement, the frontal plateau alone bears, above the 
nasals, the healed canals of at least sixteen bullet-wounds received in 
previous encounters, exclusive of those effaced by the confluent 
fissures of its latest wounds. Meerut is in lat. 29°, close to the ex¬ 
treme northern limit of habitat of the Indian Elephant. If the two 
skulls, from localities so wide apart, are compared, they agree in 
general form and proportions ; and in the details of pyramidal summit, 
long concave frontal plateau, inial fossa, occipital bosses, nasal aper¬ 
ture, position of the orbits, form and connexions of the lachrymary, 
length of incisive sheaths, &c. 
On the other hand, in all the well determined species, fossil or 
recent, of which perfect crania are known, we invariably find, that 
the latter yield strongly marked distinctive characters even when 
molar teeth are similar. In illustration I may cite E. primigenius , 
E. Indicus , E. Hysudricus , E. Nomadic us, E. planifrons, E. meridi- 
onalis , and E. Africanus, in no two of which are the crania alike. 
"While in the Ceylon and Indian Elephants, they are so closely simi¬ 
lar, that, in a museum, without a record, the mere form will not 
instruct the observer whence the specimen came—whether conti¬ 
nental or insular. The statement made in the Zoological Proceedings 
of 1849, as to the amount of difference, is clearly an exaggeration, 
(antea p. 82.) 
As regards the molar teeth, it is stated in Temminck’s ‘ Coup d’ceil,’ 
in reference to the discs of wear, that, “ ces rubans sont de la largeur 
“ de ceux qu’on voit a la couronne des dents de l’Elephant d’Afrique; 
“ ils sont consequemment moins nombreux que dans celui du Conti- 
“ nent de l’Asie.” In Professor Schlegel’s later communication, the 
statement is modified as follows:— 
“ The laminae of the teeth afford another distinction, which how- 
“ ever is less apparent to the eye than that taken from the number 
