wanting. It-would almost seem as if some
pre-Adamite butcher had divided the carcasses longitudinally, and
carried away with him all the upper halves. The reading of the enigma
seems to be, that when the creatures lay down and died, the gypsum in
which their remains occur was soft enough to permit their under sides to
sink into it, and that then gradually hardening, it kept the bones in
their places; while the uncovered upper sides, exposed to the
disintegrating influences, either mouldered away piecemeal, or were
removed by accident. The bones of the larger animals of the basin are
usually found detached; and ere they could be reconstructed into perfect
skeletons, they taxed the extraordinary powers of the greatest of
comparative anatomists. Rather more than twenty different species of
extinct mammals have been detected in the Paris basin,--not a great
number, it may be thought; and yet for so limited a locality we may deem
it not a very small one, when we take into account the fact that all our
native mammals of Britain and Ireland amount (according to Fleming), if
we except the Cetaceae and the seals, to but forty species.

[Illustration: Fig 71.

ANIMALS OF THE PARIS BASIN.[15]

(_Eocene._)]

[Illustration: Fig. 72.

DINOTHERIUM GIGANTEUM.

(_Miocene._)]

In the Middle or Miocene Tertiary, pachyderms, though of a wholly
different type from their predecessors, are still the prevailing forms.
The Dinotherium, one of the greatest quadrupedal mammals that ever
lived, seems to have formed a connecting link in this middle age between
the Pachydermata and the Cetaceae. Each ramus 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 uprooting the aquatic plants and liliaceous
roots on which the creature seems to have lived. The head, which
measured about three feet across,--a breadth, sufficient, surely, to
satisfy the demands of the most exacting phrenologist,--was provided
with muscles of enormous strength, arranged so as to give potent effect
to the operations of this strange tool. The hinder part of the skull
not a little resembled that of the Cetaceae; while, from the form of the
nasal bones, the creature was evidently furnished with a trunk like the
elephant. It seems not improbable, therefore, that this bulkiest of
mammaliferous quadrupeds constituted, as I have said, a sort