Part 16

There is a fourth species still (_Rh. minutus_), furnished, like the second, with incisors, but of a much smaller size, and scarcely larger than a hog[307]. It was undoubtedly rare, for the remains of it have only as yet been found in some places in France.

To those four genera of large pachydermata, is added a Tapir, which equalled them in size, and was consequently twice, perhaps three times, as large in its linear dimensions as the American Tapir[308]. Its teeth have been found in several parts of France and Germany; and almost always accompanying those of rhinoceroses, mastodons, or elephants.

Along with these there is still associated, but as it would seem in a very small number of places, a large pachydermatous animal, of which the lower jaw alone has been found, and whose teeth are of the form of double crescents, and undulated. M. Fischer, who discovered it among bones from Siberia, has named it _Elasmotherium_[309].

The Horse genus also existed in those times[310]. Its teeth accompany in thousands the remains of the animals which we have just mentioned, in almost all their localities; but it is not possible to say whether it was one of the species now existing or not, because the skeletons of these species are so like each other, that they cannot be distinguished by the mere comparison of isolated fragments.

The Ruminantia were now greatly more numerous than at the epoch of the Palæotheria; their numerical proportion must even have differed very little from what it is at present; but we are certain of several species which were different.

This may, in particular, be said with much certainty of a deer exceeding even the elk in size, which is common in the marl deposits and peat-bogs of Ireland and England, and of which remains have also been dug up in France, Germany, and Italy, where they were found in the same strata with bones of elephants. Its wide, palmated, and branched horns, measure so much as twelve or fourteen feet from one point to the other, following the curvatures[311].

The distinction is not so clear with regard to the bones of deer and oxen, which have been collected in certain caverns, and in the fissures of certain rocks. They are sometimes, and especially in the caverns of England, accompanied with bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotami, and with those of a hyena, which also occurs in several strata of transported matter, along with these same pachydermata. They are consequently of the same age; but it remains not the less difficult to say in what respect they differ from the oxen and deer of the present day.

The fissures of the rocks of Gibraltar, Cette, Nice, Uliveta near Pisa, and other places on the shores of the Mediterranean, are filled with a red and hard cement, which envelopes fragments of rock and fresh-water shells, and numerous bones of quadrupeds, the greater part fractured. These concretions are termed osseous brecciæ. The bones which they contain sometimes present characters sufficient to prove that they have belonged to unknown animals, or at least to animals foreign to Europe. There are found, for example, four species of deer, three of which have characters in their teeth, which are only observed in the deer of the Indian Archipelago.

There is a fifth near Verona, the horns of which exceed in magnitude those of the Canadian deer[312].

There also occur, in certain places, along with bones of rhinoceroses, and other quadrupeds of this period, those of a deer so much resembling the reindeer, that it would be difficult to assign distinctive characters to it; a circumstance which is so much the more extraordinary, that the reindeer is at the present day confined to the coldest regions of the north, while the whole genus of rhinoceroses belongs to the torrid zone.[313]

There exist in the strata of which we speak, remains of a species very similar to the fallow-deer, but a third larger,[314] and prodigious quantities of horns, very much resembling those of our present stag[315], as well as bones, very like those of the aurochs[316] and domestic ox[317], two very distinct species, which had been erroneously confounded by the naturalists who preceded us. The entire heads, however, resembling those of these two animals, as well as that of the musk-ox of Canada[318], which have often been extracted from the earth, do not come from localities sufficiently well determined to enable us to assert that these species had been contemporaries of the great pachydermata, of which we have made mention above.

The osseous brecciæ of the shores of the Mediterranean have also afforded two species of _Lagomys_,[319] animals, the genus of which exists at the present day only in Siberia; two species of rabbits[320], lemmings, and rats of the size of the water-rat and domestic mouse[321]. In the caves of England two species are also found[322].

The osseous brecciæ even contain bones of shrew-mice and lizards[323].

In certain sandy strata of Tuscany, there are teeth of a porcupine[324], and in those of Russia heads of a species of beaver, larger than ours, which M. Fischer has named _Trogontherium_[325].

But it is more particularly in the class Edentata that these races of animals belonging to the period before the last assume a size much superior to that of their present congeners, and even rise to a magnitude altogether gigantic.

The _Megatherium_ unites a part of the generic characters of the armadilloes, with some of those of the sloths, and is in size equal to the largest rhinoceros. Its claws must have been of a monstrous length, and prodigious strength; its whole skeleton possesses an excessive solidity. It has only as yet been found in the sandy strata of North America[326].

The _Megalonyx_ has been very similar to it in its characters, but has been somewhat less; its claws much longer and sharper in the edges. Some bones and entire toes of it have been found in certain caves in Virginia, and in an island on the coast of Georgia[327].

These two enormous edentata have only hitherto presented their remains in America; but Europe possesses one of the same class which does not yield to them in magnitude. It is only known by a single terminal joint of a toe, but this fragment is sufficient to assure us that it was very similar to a pangolin or manis, but to a pangolin of nearly twenty-four feet in length. It lived in the same districts as the elephants, rhinoceroses, and gigantic tapirs; for its bones have been found along with theirs in a sandy deposit in the county of Darmstadt, not far from the Rhine[328].

The osseous brecciæ also contain, but very rarely, bones of carnivora[329], which are much more numerous in caverns, that is to say, in cavities wider and more complicated than the fissures or veins containing osseous brecciæ. The Jura chain in particular, is celebrated for them in the part of it which extends into Germany, where, for ages past, incredible quantities have been removed and destroyed, on account of certain medical virtues which had been attributed to them, and yet there still remains enough to fill the mind with astonishment. The principal part of these remains consists of bones of a very large species of bear (_Ursus spelæus_), which is characterised by a more prominent forehead than that of any of our living bears[330]. Along with these bones are found those of two other species of bear (_U. arctoideus_ and _U. priscus_)[331]; those of a hyena (_H. fossilis_), allied to the spotted hyena of the Cape, but differing from it in the form of its teeth and head[332]; those of two tigers or panthers[333], of a wolf[334], a fox[335], a glutton[336], as well as of weasels, viverræ, and other small carnivora[337].

Here, also, may be observed that singular association of animals, the species resembling which live at the present day in climates so widely separated from each other as the Cape, the country of the spotted hyena, and Lapland, the country of our present gluttons. In like manner we have seen in a cave in France, a rhinoceros and a reindeer by the side of each other.

Bears are of rare occurrence in alluvial strata. Remains of the large species of the caves (_U. spelæus_), are said, however, to have been found in Austria and Hainaut; and in Tuscany there are bones of a particular species, remarkable for its compressed canine teeth (_U. cultridens_)[338]. The hyenas are more frequently met with. We have remains of them in France, found along with bones of elephants and rhinoceroses. A cave has lately been discovered in England, which contained prodigious quantities of them, where they were found of every age, and of which the soil presented even their excrements in a sufficient state of preservation to be easily recognised. It would appear that they had long lived there, and that it had been by them that the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, horses, oxen, deer, and various animals of the class of glires, which are found along with them, and which bear evident marks of their teeth, had been dragged into the cave. But what must have been the soil of England, when these enormous animals lived upon it, and constituted the prey of ferocious beasts! These caves contain also bones of tigers, wolves and foxes; but the remains of bears are of excessively rare occurrence in them[339].

However this may be, we see that, at the epoch of the animal population which we are now passing under review, the class of carnivora was numerous and powerful. It reckoned three bears with round canine teeth, one with compressed canini, a large tiger or lion, another feline animal, of the size of the panther, a hyena, a wolf, a fox, a glutton, a martin or pole-cat, and a weasel.

The class of glires, composed in general of weak and small species, has been little observed by the collectors of fossil remains; and, in all cases, where the bones of these animals have been found in the strata or deposits of which we speak, they also have presented unknown species. Such, in particular, is a species of Lagomys found in the osseous brecciæ of Corsica and Sardinia, somewhat resembling the Lagomys alpinus of the high mountains of Siberia: so true is it that it is not always in the torrid zone only, that we are to seek for the animals which resemble those of this period.

These are the principal animals, the remains of which have been found in that mass of earth, sand, and mud,--that _Diluvium_, which everywhere covers our large plains, fills our caverns, and chokes up the fissures in many of our rocks. They incontestibly formed the population of the continents, at the epoch of the great catastrophe which has destroyed their races, and which has prepared the soil, on which the animals of the present day subsist.

Whatever resemblance certain of these species bear to those of our days, it cannot be disputed that the general mass of this population had a very different character, and that the greater part of the races which composed it have been utterly destroyed.

What astonishes us is, that, among all these mammifera, the greater number of which have their congeners at the present day in the warm parts of the globe, there has not been a single quadrumanous animal,--that there has not been collected a single bone or a single tooth of an ape or monkey, not so much even as a bone or a tooth belonging to an extinct species of these animals.

Nor is there any trace of man. All the bones of our species that have been found along with those of which we have been speaking, have occurred accidentally[340], and their number besides is exceedingly small, which assuredly would not have been the case, if men had then been settled in the countries which these animals inhabited.

Where, then, was the human race at this period? Did the last and most perfect of the works of the Creator nowhere exist? Did the animals which now accompany him upon the globe, and of which there are no traces among these fossil remains, surround him? Were the countries in which he lived with them swallowed up, when those which he now inhabits, and whose former population may have been destroyed by a great inundation, were laid dry again? These are questions which the study of fossil remains does not enable us to solve, and in this discourse we must not apply for information to other sources.

This much is certain, that we are now at least in the midst of a fourth succession of land animals,--that, after the age of reptiles, the age of palæotheria, the age of mammoths, and that of mastodons and megatheria, has come the age in which the human species, aided by some domestic animals, peaceably governs and fertilizes the earth, and that it is only in the deposits formed since the commencement of this age, in alluvial matters, peat-bogs, and recent concretions, that bones are found in the fossil state, which belong all of them to known and still living animals.

Such are the human skeletons of Guadaloupe, imbedded in a species of travertine formed of land shells, slate, and fragments of shells and madrepores of the neighbouring sea; the bones of oxen, deer, roes, and beavers, common in peat-bogs, and all the bones of men and domestic animals found in the mud and sand deposited by rivers, in burying grounds, and upon ancient fields of battle.

None of these remains belong either to the great deposit formed at the time of the last catastrophe, nor to those of preceding ages.

APPENDIX.

APPENDIX.

_On the birds to which the name of Ibis was given by the ancient Egyptians._

Every body has heard of the Ibis, a bird to which the ancient Egyptians rendered a religious homage; which they reared within the precincts of their temples; allowed to wander unmolested through their towns; whose murderer, even although he had involuntarily become so, was punished with death[341]; which they embalmed with as much care as their parents;--a bird to which they attributed a virgin purity; an inviolable attachment to their country, of which it was the emblem, an attachment so great that it suffered itself to die of hunger when it was transported elsewhere;--a bird which possessed instinct enough to know the increase and waning of the moon, and to regulate accordingly the quantity of its daily food, and the development of its young; which arrested at the frontiers of Egypt the serpents which would otherwise have carried destruction into that sacred land[342], and which inspired them with such terror that they dreaded its very feathers[343];--a bird, in fine, whose form the gods would have assumed, had they been forced to adopt a mortal figure, and into which Mercury was really transformed, when he had a mind to traverse the earth, and instruct men in the sciences and arts.

No other animal could have been so easy to recognize as this; for there is no other of which the ancients have left us at once, as of the ibis, excellent descriptions, accurate and even coloured figures, and the body itself preserved with its feathers, under the triple envelope of a preservative bitumen, thick and close folds of linen, and solid and well varnished vases. And yet, of all the modern authors who have spoken of the ibis, there is but one, the celebrated Bruce, a traveller more famous for his courage than for the justness of his opinions in natural history, who has not blundered respecting the true species of this bird; and his ideas with regard to this subject, however accurate they were, have not even been adopted by naturalists[344].

After several changes of opinion respecting the ibis, it was seemingly agreed, at the period when I published the first edition of this work, to give the name of Ibis to a bird a native of Africa, almost of the size of the stork, with white plumage, having the quills black, perched upon long red legs, armed with a long arched beak, of a pale yellow colour, sharp at its edges, rounded at its base, and notched at its point, and whose face is covered with a red skin destitute of feathers, which do not extend farther forward than the eyes.

Such is the Ibis of Perrault[345], the Ibis candida of Brisson[346], the Ibis blanc d’Egypte of Buffon[347], and the Tantalus Ibis of Linnæus, in his twelfth edition. It was to this same bird, also, that Blumenbach, while he avowed that it is of very rare occurrence at the present day, at least in Lower Egypt, asserted that the Egyptians rendered divine honours[348]; and yet this naturalist had possessed opportunities of examining bones of the true ibis in a mummy which he opened in London[349].

I also participated in the error of those celebrated men whom I have just mentioned, until the moment when I was enabled to examine some mummies of the ibis by myself. This pleasure was procured for me, for the first time, by the late M. Fourcroy, to whom M. Grobert, Colonel of Artillery, on his return from Egypt, had given two of these mummies, both taken from the pits of Saccara. On carefully exposing them, we perceived that the bones of the embalmed bird were much smaller than those of the _Tantalus ibis_ of naturalists; that they did not much exceed those of the curlew in size, that its beak resembled that of the latter, being only a little shorter in proportion to its thickness, and not at all that of the tantalus; and, lastly, that its plumage was white with the quills marked with black, as the ancients have described it.

We are therefore convinced, that the bird which the ancient Egyptians embalmed, was by no means the Tantalus ibis of naturalists, that it was smaller, and that it was to be sought for in the curlew genus. We found, after some inquiries, that the mummies of the ibis which had been opened before by different naturalists, were similar to ours. Buffon says expressly that he examined several of them; that the birds which they contained had the beak and size of curlews; and yet he has blindly followed Perrault in taking the African tantalus for the ibis. One of those mummies opened by Buffon still exists in the museum; it is similar to those which we have examined.

Dr Shaw, in the supplement to his Travels[350], describes and figures with care the bones of a similar mummy. The beak, he says, was six English inches in length, similar to that of the curlew, &c. In a word, its description agrees entirely with ours.

Caylus, in his Collection of Antiquities, vol. vi. pl. xl. fig. 1., gives a representation of the mummy of an ibis, the height of which, with its bandages, is only one foot seven inches four lines, although he says expressly that the bird was placed upon its feet with the head straight out, and that it had no part inflected in its embalment.

Hasselquist, who took a small white and black heron for the ibis, gives, as his principal reason, that the size of this bird, which is that of a crow, corresponds very well with that of the mummies of the ibis[351]. How, then, could Linnæus have given the name of ibis to a bird as large as a stork? How, especially, could he have considered this bird to be the same as the Ardea ibis of Hasselquist, which, besides its smallness, had the beak straight? And how has this latter error of synonymy been preserved to this very day in the _Systema Naturæ_?

A short time after this examination, which was made in the presence of M. Fourcroy, M. Olivier had the politeness to shew us the bones which he had taken from two mummies of the ibis, and to open along with us two others. These bones were found similar to those of Colonel Grobert’s mummies; one of the four only was smaller, but it was easy to judge by the epiphyses that it had belonged to a young individual.

The only figure of the beak of an embalmed ibis, which does not entirely agree with the objects which we have had under our eyes, is that of Edwards (pl. cv.); it is a ninth part larger, and yet we do not doubt its accuracy, for M. Olivier shewed us also a beak an eighth or a ninth longer than the others, or in the proportion of 180 to 165, which had been equally taken from a mummy. This beak only shews that there were among the ibises individuals larger than others; but it proves nothing in favour of the tantalus, for it has not at all the form of the beak of that animal. Its beak is perfectly similar to that of the curlews; and besides, the beak of the tantalus is a third longer than that of our largest embalmed ibises, and two-fifths longer than that of the smallest.

We have ascertained further, that similar variations with regard to the size of the beak exist in our European curlews, according to the age and sex. They are still more strongly marked in the green curlew of Italy, and in our godwits; and this variation appears to be a property common to most of the species of the family of scolopaceous birds.

Lastly, our naturalists returned from the expedition to Egypt with a rich harvest of objects, as well ancient as recent. My learned friend M. Geoffroy St Hilaire, in particular, had occupied himself with the greatest care in collecting mummies of all descriptions, and had brought with him a great number of those of the ibis, both from Saccara and Thebes.

The former were in the same state as those which M. Grobert had brought, that is to say, their bones had undergone a sort of half burning, and were without consistence; they broke on the slightest touch, and it was very difficult to obtain any entire, and still more so to detach them for the purpose of making a skeleton.

The bones of those brought from Thebes were much better preserved, either on account of the greater heat of the climate, or from the more efficacious means employed for their preparation; and M. Geoffroy having sacrificed some of them to me, M. Rousseau, my assistant, succeeded, by dint of patience and address, and by the employment of ingenious and delicate methods of procedure, in making up an entire skeleton, by stripping all the bones, and connecting them with a very fine wire. This skeleton is deposited in the anatomical galleries of the museum, of which it forms one of the most beautiful ornaments, and we have represented it in Pl. iv.

It is likely that this mummy must have been that of a bird kept in a state of domesticity in the temples, for its left humerus has been broken and joined again. It is probable that a wild bird, whose wing had been broken, would have perished before it had healed, from its being unable to pursue its prey, or to escape from its enemies.

This skeleton puts it in our power to determine, without any uncertainty, the characters and proportions of the bird. We see clearly that it was in all points a true curlew, a little larger than the common curlew of Europe, but having the beak thicker and shorter. The following is a comparative table of the dimensions of the two birds, taken, for the ibis, from the skeleton of the mummy of Thebes, and for the curlew, from a skeleton which previously existed in our anatomical galleries. We have added those of parts of the Saccara ibises, which we succeeded in obtaining entire.