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The Hipparion has large depressions on the face in front of the orbits, like those for the "larmiers" of many ruminants; but traces of these are to be seen in some of the fossil horses from the Sewalik Hills; and, as Leidy's recent researches show, they are preserved in Anchitherium.
I should prefer believing that the Galaxias was a species, like the Emys of the Sewalik Hills, which has long retained the same form.
The southern wall cases of the room contain a fine collection of the fossil remains of elephants and mastodons, chiefly from the Sewalik Hills of northern India. On the right of the entrance from the fifth room are some fossil mammalia from Montmartre arranged by Cuvier.
Its position, above the sandstones of the Sewalik range in the north-west Himalaya, and those of Sikkim, which appear to be modern fossiliferous rocks, indicates its being geologically of recent formation; but it still remains a subject of the utmost importance to discover the extent and nature of the ocean to whose agency it is referred.
Having noticed these fossils the visitor should examine the wall case in the north-eastern corner of the room in which are deposited many bones of mammalia from the Sewalik Hills, including the teeth and jaws of an extinct species of camel; and the skull of the remarkable livatherium; and on the top of the case are various bones of the same extinct monster.
The Hipparion has large depressions on the face in front of the orbits, like those for the "larmiers" of many ruminants; but traces of these are to be seen in some of the fossil horses from the Sewalik Hills; and, as Leidy's recent researches show, they are preserved in Anchitherium.
The British paleontologists to-day marvel at Elephas ganesa, and by great labor dig his bones out of the Sewalik rocks, but what one of them all has yet made a move to save Rhinoceros indicus from the quick extermination that soon will be his portion unless he is accorded perpetual and real protection from the assaults of man? Let the mammalogists of the world face this fact.
The most remarkable of the remains inclosed in the wall cases of this room are the remains of the carapace and other portions of the gigantic Fossil Tortoise from the Sewalik Hills, Bengal, discovered by the enterprising Major Cautley; and the gigantic fossil bones of an extinct genus of birds that inhabited New Zealand in the remote past.
As I do not expect you all, or perhaps any of you, to become such botanists as General Monro, whose recent "Monograph of the Bamboos" is an honour to British botanists, and a proof of the scientific power which is to be found here and there among British officers: so I do not expect you to become such geologists as Sir Roderick Murchison, or even to add such a grand chapter to the history of extinct animals as Major Cautley did by his discoveries in the Sewalik Hills.
I should prefer looking at the whole Asiatic continent as having formerly been more African in its fauna, than admitting the former existence of a continent across the Indian Ocean. Decaisne's paper on the flora of Timor, in which he points out its close relation to that of the Mascarene Islands, supports your view. On the other hand, I might advance the giraffes, etc., in the Sewalik deposits.
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