Aurignac is to be referred to a period, coeval with the most ancient geological deposits in which the products of human industry have been found, the diluvial beds of St. Acheul and of Abbeville,that the violent phenomena of that diluvian period, and the great cataclysm* connected with those beds, have not affected the original conditions of this cavern? It is obvious, in fact, that nothing has been disturbed, and that, not only have a simple slab of stone a few centimetres in thickness, and a thin covering of loose earth, sufficed to preserve intact the sepulchre itself, but also that outside the cave, the relics of the funeral repasts and the various implements and arms left by the human inhabitants have not been disturbed.

It has been observed above that, from its isolated position in the mountain range of Aurignac, the mountain of Fajoles is completely protected from the streams and torrents of the surrounding country. Nevertheless, upon looking at the geological map of France, we find that the colour indicating the great alluvial deposits of the Garonne, Adour, &c., is wanting in the interval between the little valleys which commence on the plateau of Lanemézan. A very slight elevation of the borders of this plateau has been sufficient to protect the whole of the intermediate region, (more than 200 square leagues,) within which are comprised the district of Aurignac, from the invasion of this diluvium or Pyrenean drift.

I am here obliged to repeat what I have already said elsewhere: viz., that the grand words, revolution of the globe, cataclysm, universal perturbation, general catastrophes, &c., have been introduced by a sort of abuse into the technical language of Science, seeing that they tend to give an exaggerated significance to phenomena, which geographically have been very limited in extent, These phenomena, however stupendous they may appear to us, as manifested within the limits of our sensible horizon, are reduced to very little when brought down by actual calculation to their relative importance as regards the whole surface of the globe. Everything, moreover, indicates that the successive production of these partial accidents forms part of the normal conditions of the course of nature, and that the great harmony seen in the physical and organic evolutions on the surface of the earth, has in no case been affected by them.

Aristotle fully comprehended those alternating movements of the land, which at several intervals have changed the relations of continents and seas. He also reduced to its regional proportions the deluge of Deucalion, so embellished and magnified by the fictions of poetry. This great naturalist appears to have been obliged to combat the fantastic conceptions of the revolutionist philosophers of his time; and the rude apostrophe which he addressed to them, "ridiculum enim est, propter parvas et momentaneas permutationes, movere ipsum totum." (Meteorol. 1. i. c 2.), might well, after two thousand years, be applied to some among us, geologists and paleontologists of the present day.

These alluvial beds or diluvium occupying the bottom of the valleys of the Garonne and of the Adour, should not be confounded with the pebbles and argillaceous deposits, lying at a higher level on terraces more or less continuous, ordinarily on the left side of the course of the rivers. These deposits, in which the granitic, ophitic, and other feldspathic pebbles, are almost always in a decomposed state, belong to a more ancient period, or that of the original excavation of the valleys. At the bottom of the valleys of the Garonne and of the Adour, the granitic, and other pebbles of the Pyrenean drift, are numerous and perfectly preserved. None of the kind are met with in the little valleys descending from the plateau of Lanemnézan.

In the valley of the Garonne, the Pyrenean drift is the geological or synchronal equivalent of the diluvium of the Seine and of the diluvial deposits of Amiens, Abbeville, &c., because it is in these alluvial beds, that are found the remains of Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorinus, and other species regarded as characteristic of the diluvium.

But this phenomenon of torrential recrudescence, which has produced the diluvium, and whose cause must be sought in a sudden return to regional conditions of extreme temperature, has been manifested, only to a comparatively very trifling extent, in all the valleys descending from the plateau of Lanemézan. It is not astonishing therefore, to find that the sepulchre of Aurignac, if it existed at that time, should not have suffered any damage from the effect of the great floods of the period, seeing that, from its comparative altitude, it was placed beyond their reach.

I would, nevertheless, go farther, and say that viewed simply under the paleontological relations manifested in it, the sepulchre of Aurignac claims a very high comparative antiquity. In fact, the Great Cave Bear, which we there behold evidently cotemporary with man, has not, so far as I know, yet been found in France in the diluvium. It is true, that it has been mentioned in a list which has several times been reproduced, of the fossil Mammals discovered in the diluvial beds of Abbeville; but I have in vain tried to get at the source of the methodical determination upon which this statement rests, and from all that I have seen of its fossil remains the Bear, either from the valley of the Somme, or from the environs of Paris, belongs to a species, or to more than one species, very certainly distinct from Ursus spelaus. In the centre of France, and in England, all the remains of the latter species, not found in caverns, come from deposits, regarded by geologists as more ancient than the diluvium.

It will, doubtless, be objected to this, that the remains of Ursus spelaus occur very abundantly in most of the caverns of the continent, and even in some of those in England; but, at the same time, it must not be forgotten that the date of the filling of these caverns is evidently to be placed beyond the epoch assigned by geologists to the diluvial phenomena, because in several of these caverns, at any rate, the remains of Mammals are met with, which are sometimes included in the lists of species referred to the latter phases of the tertiary period.

We see then, that if we rely solely upon the consideration of the palæontological concomitances, the result we should arrive at would be, that the sepulchre of Aurignac should be referred, together with all the circumstances accompanying it, to an epoch anterior to the diluvium properly so termed. In confining the force of this remark simply within the limits of its inductive value, I do not think I am losing sight of the reserve with which new propositions should be introduced, when they as yet repose only on negative observations.

VII. THE SUMATRAN ELEPHANT. BY Prof. H. Schlegel.

[The following translation from the Dutch, of a paper read by Prof. H. Schlegel, before the Royal Academy of Sciences of Holland,* gives some further details respecting the Sumatran Elephant. This species was distinguished by Temminck some years ago, from the Elephant of Continental India, and proposed to be called Elephas sumatranus,t but is hardly known to Naturalists of this country, except from the short notice of it communicated by the late Prince Charles Bonaparte, to one of the meetings of the Zoological Society of London, in 1849.-P. L. S.]

It is well known that Sumatra is the only island of the Indian Archipelago, where Elephants are found wild. Magelhaens has informed us, that the Elephants which he saw in Borneo, were introduced there, and that the animal is as little indigenous to that island as to Java.

So long as all living Elephants were treated of as belonging to one species, no one thought of comparing them together; and even after Cuvier had pointed out that the Elephant of Africa was very different from that of India, yet the opinion remained that all the Asiatic Elephants constituted but one species, though, as we shall presently show, the examples on which Cuvier established his Elephas africanus, differed specifically inter se. This idea, indeed, had gone so far that no one took the trouble to examine further the Elephants, which were brought alive from time to time from Sumatra to Java, and there kept in a half-domestic state, but people were content to refer them to the so-called Indian or Asiatic Elephant, to which also, according to Cuvier, the Ceylonese Elephant belongs.

As, however, nothing is proved by a negative, and it is of great importance in a large Museum to obtain illustrations of the Faunas of different countries, I never ceased to urge my predecessor, Heer Temminck, to obtain specimens of the Sumatran Elephant for the Royal Museum. In August, 1845, I was fortunate enough to be gratified in this respect, several examples of Elephants from the district of Palembang in Sumatra, having been liberally forwarded to the Museum, by his Excellency the Baron J. C. Baud-at that time Governor of the Dutch possessions in India. As I was unpacking them it appeared to me that they differed in several respects from the Elephant of Bengal. I occupied myself, therefore, with drawing up the characters of these two animals, compared with those of the African Elephant, and gave the results to Heer Temminck;

* See Verslagen en Mededeelingen der Koninklijke Academie van Wetenschappen, Afd. Natuurkunde, 1861, p. 101.

See his "Coup d'œil sur les possesions Nederlandaises dans les Indes Orientales." Vol. II. p. 91.

See Proc. Zool. Soc. 1849, p. 144.

which he afterwards published, calling the new species by the name Elephas sumatranus.

Since that period, several other examples of the Elephant living in Sumatra have been brought to the Netherlands, so that I have had the opportunity of examining them. Amongst these were seven skeletons, of which three are still in the Royal Museum, several skulls, a young specimen of about three feet high also now in the Museum, and a living animal about six feet high now in the Zoological Gardens, at Amsterdam. All these specimens exhibited alike the characters, in which they differed from such examples of the so-called Indian Elephant, as I have examined.

I say the so-called Indian Elephant, because it has not yet been settled to which species we should apply this name. The name is generally given to that species of Elephant which has been brought from Continental India, and particularly, as it appears, from Bengal to Europe. This practice we have followed, but we must nevertheless guard ourselves from believing that this was exactly the species which Cuvier described under the name Elephas indicus. Cuvier assigns to his E. indicus twenty dorsal vertebræ, and consequently a like number of pairs of ribs. This would lead us to believe that Cuvier's determination was made upon a skeleton of the species which lives in Sumatra, and not upon one of the Bengalese species, which has only nineteen dorsal vertebræ and a like number of pairs of ribs.t

The under jaw figured by Cuvier, pl. 5, fig. 3, seems, judging from the width of the lamina of the teeth, to belong also to the Sumatran species.

The figure, pl. 1, fig. 1, is on the other hand apparently taken from a skeleton of the Bengalese Elephant, since it has only nineteen dorsal vertebræ and as many pairs of ribs, and this is perhaps also the case with the figure of the skull, pl. 4, fig. 1, and that of the under jaw, pl. 5, fig. 2.

The supposition that both the other skeletons, examined by Cuvier, belonged to the second Asiatic sort is fully established by what he says, pp. 66, 67.

He says here, that he has examined three skeletons of the Indian

Coup d'œil, II. p. 91.

It is very curious that Cuvier seems to have quite overlooked the differences in the number of dorsal vertebræ and ribs, not only in both the Asiatic but also in the African Elephant, for otherwise he could hardly have avoided alluding to them. The chapter of his Ossemens fossiles (I. p. 12), in which he speaks of the skeleton of the Elephant, has the heading "Description generale de l'osteologie de l'Elephant, principalement d'apres l'Elephant des Indes," and it seems from the particulars here mentioned, that his principal object was the comparison of the skulls of the African and Indian Elephants; on the other hand that he confined himself to the consideration of the skeleton of Elephas sumatranus of Ceylon, while his figure of the skeleton represents that of the Bengalese Elephant. Again, (p. 241) he says, l'Elephant (thus speaking generally), a une vertèbre dorsale et une paire des côtesa plus, i. e. than the Mastodon, which, according to him, has only nineteen.

Elephant. One of these, which, according to Cuvier, belongs to the variety called Dauntelah by Corse, was sent to the Museum at Leyden, in 1815, six years before the appearance of the second edition of the "Ossemens Fossiles," (see that ed. p. 66), where it exists at the present day. This skeleton agrees in all particulars with the Elephant of Bengal, having only nineteen dorsal vertebræ and the like number of ribs. The description which Cuvier gives of his Elephas indicus seems, therefore, to have been based exclusively upon his two other skeletons. Both of these, as he himself informs us, were from Ceylon. He tells us this, in the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, (1806, p. 148), speaking of the male which he identifies with the variety, Mooknah of Corse; and he says the same (Oss. Foss. p. 67) of the female, which he considers as belonging to the variety Komarea of Corse, adding that these were the skeletons of two Elephants brought from Ceylon to the Netherlands in 1786, and afterwards taken from thence to Paris.*

Hence it appears very clear that Cuvier described his Elephas indicus from specimens of two different species, one of which agrees with the Elephant of Bengal, whilst the others have all the characters of the Elephant of Sumatra. Since, therefore, both the latter skeletons attributed by Cuvier to Ceylon, presented the characters of the Elephant of Sumatra, it appeared to me to be probable that the Ceylonese Elephant belonged to the Sumatran species, and not to that of Bengal-the so-called Elephas indicus. This conjecture has been now wholly unexpectedly confirmed through a fortunate conjunction of circumstances, in a manner which leaves no further doubt on the subject. The celebrated traveller DIARD, advanced in years, but still endued with that untiring zeal and youthful activity by which science and our National Museum have profited so largely, during his long service under the government of the Netherlands, passed three months in Ceylon, in 1838, on a journey undertaken with the object of investigating the system of cultivation, and employed his leisure time in collecting the animals of the island. During some Elephant-shooting expeditions, he obtained a male and female Elephant from seven to eight feet high, and besides these two young specimens, which he placed entire in casks filled with arrack.

The

In the Paris Museum at the present moment, as I learn by a friendly communication of Dr. Pucheran, there are, besides the skeletons of the two Ceylonese Elephants, brought from Holland to Paris in 1795, and examined by Cuvier, a third sent by Duvancel from Bengal. M. Pucheran confirms the fact, that both the Ceylonese elephant-skeletons have twenty dorsal vertebræ and twenty pairs of ribs. He finds, however, the same number in the skeleton from Bengal. From this one might be led to suppose, that the Ceylonese Elephant is also found in Bengal. But I think it would be rash to consider this fact established by a single observation, as all the skeletons of Bengalese Elephants which I have examined have had, without exception, only nineteen dorsal vertebræ and nineteen ribs. It is more likely that Duvaucel's skeleton was taken from a Ceylonese Elephant; examples of this sort being, as we shall afterwards show on the authority of Heer Diard, often brought living to Bengal.