defensive weapons. These are the first examples of bi-hooved animals as yet discovered upon earth; they were strictly herbivorous, and make a slight approach to the cervine or deer tribes. The common anoplothere was about the size of an ass, but less elevated from the ground, and with a tail of above three feet in length; it is supposed to have been of aquatic habits, and an expert swimmer and diver, but also given to browsing upon land. Associated with these we find the first example (choropotamus) of an animal approaching to the hog tribe, being nearest to the peccary of South America.

We learn from the remainder of the Paris fossils, and from others found in the eocene, that the earth now possessed freshwater reptiles; serpents of the size of the boa; natatorial, wading, and rapacious birds; rodents (dormouse and squirrel); species allied to the racoon, the genet, and fox; also bats and monkeys. Lastly, the oldest tertiaries of America present us with the Zeuglodon, a herbivorous whale resembling the dugong, having a stinted development of the extremities, but an enormous tail, and reaching altogether the length of a hundred feet.

In the miocene subperiod, the shells give eighteen per cent. of existing species, showing a considerable advance from the preceding era with regard to the inhabitants of the sea. The advance in land animals is less marked, but yet considerable. The predominating forms are

FIG. 66.

still pachyderms, and the

tapiroid animals con

Skull of Dinotherium.

tinue to be conspicuous. Here occur remains of the Dinotherium,

a creature said to exhibit an affinity to the cetacea in the form of its head, and to the tapir in the character of its teeth. It is most distinguished by its huge size, being not less than eighteen feet long; it had a mole-like form of the shoulderblade, conferring the power of digging for food, and a couple of tusks turning down from the lower jaw, by which it could have attached itself, like the walrus, to a shore or bank, while its body floated in the water. Dr. Buckland considers this and some similar miocene animals, as adapted to a semi-aquatic life, in a region where lakes abounded. Besides the tapirs, we have in this era animals allied to the glutton, the bear, the dog, the horse, the hog, and lastly, several felines (creatures of which the lion is the type); all of which are new forms, as far as we know. There was also an abundance of marine mammalia, seals, dolphins, lamantins, walruses, and whales.

The shells of the older pliocene give from thirty-five to fiftythose of the newer, from ninety to ninety-five per cent. of existing species. The pachydermata of the preceding era now disappear; but others enter upon the scene-elephantoid animals, the hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and horse. All of these bear a striking resemblance to pachyderms of the same families still existing. We have, in the mastodon and mammoth, which succeed

each other in the strata, elephants variously distinguished from the present by peculiarities in their dentition, and hence considered as of different species. What is remarkable of these ancient animals is their having lived in countries so far beyond the present range of their family, namely, throughout the whole temperate region of Asia and Europe (England not being excepted), and even so far north as the seventieth degree of latitude. The mammoth also inhabited North America. Its chief external peculiarity

was a pair of long curved tusks extending forwards and upwards from the upper jaw. The numerous remains of the animal in the most superficial strata, and the discovery (in 1801) of a specimen with its flesh and hide entire in a mass of ice at the mouth of the Lena in Siberia, show that it must have lived down to comparatively modern times.

From remains

The pliocene gives many other new families. which have been found, however fragmentary in many cases, there cannot be a doubt that all the principal mammalian forms, except the highest and a few others, now, existed throughout the earth, and in species which only differed from those still living in slight

peculiarities, chiefly of dentition. Bears, badgers, hyenas, and feline animals: moles and other insectivores; otters and weasels; the wolf and dog; then roamed for prey as now; besides an extinct felina, the machairodus, possessing teeth like curved saws. England had beavers and bears, little different from living species; only, one of the former family was of huge bulk. We also had the hippopotamus and rhinoceros. Oxen, deer, camels, etc., inhabited the great zoological province with which we are connected; and monkeys and apes passed far beyond the tropical regions to which they are now confined. In India, besides the pachyderms of the European eocene, there were ruminants in abundance (including an extraordinary one, of huge bulk, named the Sivatherium), carnivores, rodents, and insectivores. Here

also were monkeys, of unusual bulk; but the most wonderful animal as yet discovered in this region was a tortoise, not distinguishable in any point of structure from a land species now living, but reaching the surprising length of eighteen feet. The discoveries among the tertiaries of South America have been of a not less interesting character, in as far as they equally show an approach to the existing zoological characters of that region. Dr. Lund, a Danish naturalist, presents us with a monkey, indicating the features of the platyrrhine or New World group; and the

edentate order, which is still most peculiar to that region, is there preceded by examples of vast size. In the megatherium, megalonyx, scelidotherium, and mylodon, we have a family of

sloths, of elephantine magnitude, which lived by breaking down and eating trees. The toxodon surprises us not less, being a proportionally huge member of the rodent order,—that order which now includes most of the smallest quadrupeds.'

One remarkable circumstance connected with the tertiary formation remains to be noticed, the prevalence of volcanic action at that era. In Auvergne, in Catalonia, near Venice, and in the vicinity of Rome and Naples, lavas exactly resembling the produce of existing volcanoes are associated and intermixed with the lacustrine as well as marine tertiaries. The superficies of tertiaries in England is disturbed by two great swells, forming what are called anticlinal axes, one of which divides the London

The tertiary mammalia are chiefly described from the beautiful work of Professor Owen, A History of British Fossil Mammalia and Birds, 1845.