. The testimony of the rocks; . AL^ONTOLOGICAL extinct mammals have been detected in the Paris basin, —not a great number, it may be thought; and yet for solimited a locality we may deem it not a very small one,when we take into account the fact that all our nativemammals of Britain and Ireland amount (according toFlemiug), if we except the Cetaceae and the seals, to butforty species. In the Middle or Miocene Tertiary, pachyderms, thoughof a wholly different type from their predecessors, are stillthe prevailing forms. The Dinotherium, one of the greatestquadrupedal mammals that ever lived, see
. The testimony of the rocks; . AL^ONTOLOGICAL extinct mammals have been detected in the Paris basin, —not a great number, it may be thought; and yet for solimited a locality we may deem it not a very small one,when we take into account the fact that all our nativemammals of Britain and Ireland amount (according toFlemiug), if we except the Cetaceae and the seals, to butforty species. In the Middle or Miocene Tertiary, pachyderms, thoughof a wholly different type from their predecessors, are stillthe prevailing forms. The Dinotherium, one of the greatestquadrupedal mammals that ever lived, seems to have formeda connecting link in this middle age between the Pachyder-mata and the Cetaceae. Each Iamus of the under jaw,which in the larger specimens are fully four feet in length,bore at the symphysis a great bent tusk turned downwards,which appears to have been employed as a pickaxe in uproot-ing the aquatic plants and liliaceous roots on which the crea-ture seems to have lived. The head, which measured about Fig. DINOTHERIUM GIGANTEUM. {Miocene.) three feet across,—a breadth, sufficient, surely, to satisfy thedemands of the most exacting phrenologist,—was providedwith muscles of enormous strength, arranged so as to gh^e /potent effect to the operations of this strange tool. The HISTORY OF ANIMALS. 123 hinder part of the skull not a little resembled that of theCetaceae; while, from the form of the nasal bones, the crea-ture was evidently furnished wdth a trunk Hke the seems not improbable, therefore, that this bulkiest ofmammaliferous quadrupeds constituted, as I have said, asort of uniting tie between creatures still associated in thehuman mind, from the circumstance of their massive propor-tions, as the greatest that swim the sea or walk the land, —the whale and the elephant. The Mastodon, an elephantoidanimal, also furnished, like the elephant, with tusks andtrunk, but marked by certain pecuHarities which constituteil a different genus, seems
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