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This first mile cleared, they saw a large hole, opened through the underwood, which ended obliquely at the rivulet and followed its bank. It was a passage made by elephants, and those animals, doubtless by hundreds, were in the habit of traversing this part of the forest. Great holes, made by the feet of the enormous pachyderms, riddled a soil softened during the rainy season.
The whole assemblage, says Desnoyers, indicate the shores of a lake, or several small lakes communicating with each other, on the borders of which many species of pachyderms wandered, and beasts of prey which occasionally devoured them. The tooth-marks of these last had been detected by palaeontologists long before on the bones and skulls of Paleotheres entombed in the gypsum.
As I have alluded more than once in this chapter to the occurrence of the remains of the hippopotamus in places where there are now no rivers, not even a rill of water, and as other bones of the same genus have been met with in the lower-level gravels of the Somme where large blocks of sandstone seem to imply that ice once played a part in their transportation, it may be well to consider, before proceeding farther, what geographical and climatal conditions are indicated by the presence of these fossil pachyderms.
No one will dispute that the rudimentary teeth in the upper jaws of young ruminants, and certain rudimentary bones of the leg, are highly serviceable in exhibiting the close affinity between Ruminants and Pachyderms. Robert Brown has strongly insisted on the fact that the position of the rudimentary florets is of the highest importance in the classification of the Grasses.
Cuvier ranked the Ruminants and Pachyderms as two of the most distinct orders of mammals; but so many fossil links have been disentombed that Owen has had to alter the whole classification, and has placed certain Pachyderms in the same sub-order with ruminants; for example, he dissolves by gradations the apparently wide interval between the pig and the camel.
The distinctions are obvious and striking if you compare the definitions of these great groups as they now exist. The same may be said of many of the subordinate groups, or orders, into which these great classes are divided. At the present time, for example, there are numerous forms of non-ruminant pachyderms, or what we may call broadly, the pig tribe, and many varieties of ruminants.
The eastern continent had then, as now, its great pachyderms, elephants, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus; South America its armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters; Australia a crowd of marsupials; and the very strange birds of New Zealand had predecessors of similar strangeness.
He satisfied himself that the animal must have belonged to the family of Pachyderms; and he then proceeded to analyze and compare all the living species, till he had collected ample evidence to show that the bones in question did not correspond with any species, and could not even be referred to any genus, now in existence.
However, with such means as he had, Cuvier began a comparison with all the living Mammalia, with the human skeleton first, with Monkeys, with the larger Carnivora and Ruminants, then with all the smaller Mammalia, then with the Pachyderms; and here, for the first time, he began to find some resemblance.
He might be slightly recalcitrant now and then, as is the habit of long-eared pachyderms, under the thong of the fair Countess's tongue; but there seemed little probability that he would ever get his neck loose. Still, a bachelor's heart is an outlying fortress that some fair enemy may any day take either by storm or stratagem; and there was always the possibility that Mr.
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