80 
BRITISH POSSIL ELEPHANTS. 
with the probable food of the denizens of the two regions, and the results of natural 
selection. How far a race character can be determined on one or other conditions' I am 
not at piesent prepared to say, but with the view of arriving at some conclusion on this 
head I have carefully attempted to determine the relative thickness of the ridges in a 
large number of molars from British and foreign localities with the following results ■} 
All the teeth from Kent’s Cavern, Devonshire, show the Arctic type, and have 
thin enamel. In two molars from Brighton, in the British Museum, one from “ gravel” 
is ///zfl-plated, whilst another from a “ raised beach ” (?), and in Mantell’s Collec¬ 
tion, is thick- plated. It might be asked were these two deposits contemporaneous ? In 
the National Collection the following localities have produced Mammoth molars with thin- 
plates :—No. 27,908, railway-cutting Ipswich ; No. 47,122 Kettering, Northampton¬ 
shire; No. 41,081, Isle of Dogs, “in peat;” and Penny Stratford, in Bucks; also 
Lexden, in Bucks, “in peat;” at Lamarsh, a railway-cutting in the Stour Valley, 
furnished three molars, and which are now in the British Museum. One tooth has thick 
enamel, and in two it is thin. With one exception, and that is in the mandible referred 
to at p. 108, all the Dogger Bank molars are thin- plated. So numerous are Mr. 
Owles’ gatherings in the British Museum that no less than twenty-four ultimate true 
molars of the Mammoth are represented. 
A tooth from a “raised beach,” PI. XI, figs. 1 and le, in Bracklesham Bay, is very 
^Vz-plated. 
Palconer refers to a f/u'w-plated molar from the Mendip Caves ; 3 there is a 
similar tooth from a cavern near Wells, Somersetshire, in the British Museum, and 
another from Hinton, in the same county, in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons; 
a tooth in the National Collection, from Wookey Hole, is also decidedly thin- plated, as 
seen in PI. X, figs. 3 and 3 a. It is, however, only a penultimate milk-molar, and may 
be considered as scarcely characteristic. 
The molars dredged up on the East Coast of Norfolk are, for the most part, thin- 
plated, but specimens from Harwich and Cromer, in the British Museum, have thick 
enamel. Their exact stratigraphical positions, however, are uncertain. The teeth from 
Ilford, as shown by Davies, not only represent a small form or race, but are unexcep- 
tionally thick- plated, whilst those from Crayford and Erith, on the opposite side of the 
river, are thin- plated; and whilst a thick- plated tooth is represented by a molar from the 
river deposits of the Thames under Pall Mall, in London, the other extreme is well 
shown by PI. XIV, fig. 1, from Millbank, higher up, and others from Thames river 
deposit at Battersea, Clapton, and from Oxford gravels; the last named are 
1 It is of importance in calculating the actual thickness of the plates and space occupied by each to 
take the measurement at the enamel reflections, as the ridges have a tendency to bend towards one 
another about the middle of the molar. The enamel, on the other hand, is generally thickest about the 
middle of the plate. 
2 ‘Pal. Mem.,’ vol. ii, p. 172. 
