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Show 150 S'l'. FE. Oct. 1833. tance only of a few yards in the same earthy mass. No. sensible difference in their state of decay could be perce1ved ; they were both tender, and partially stained red. If the horse did not coexist with the Toxodon, the tooth must by some accident not very easily understood, have been em- ' . bedded within the last three centuries (the period of the In-troduction of the horse), with the remains of those animals, which ao-es since perished, when the Pampas was covered by the wate0 rs of the sea. Now, I may ask, will any one ere d1' t that two teeth of nearly equal size, buried in the same substance close together, after a period of so vast an inequality, could exist in the same condition of decay ? We must conclude otherwise. Certainly it is a marvellous event in the history of animals, that a native kind should have disappeared* to be succeeded in after ages by the countless herds introduced with the Spanish colonist ! But our surprise should be modified when it is already known, that the remains of the Mastodon angustidens (the tooth formerly alluded to as embedded near that of the horse, probably belonged to this species) have been found both in South America, and in the southern parts of Europe. With regard to North America, Cuvier says t the Elephas primigenius "has left thousands of its carcasses from Spain to the shores of Siberia, and it has been found in the whole of North America." The fossil ox, in a like manner, he writes,t is buried "dans toute la partie boreale des deux continens, puisque on en a d' Allemagne, d'ltalie, de Prussie, de la Siberie occidentale et orientale, et de 1' Amerique." I may here add that horses' bones, mingled with those of the mastodon, have several times been transmitted for sale from North America to England ; but it has always been imagined, from the simple fact of their being horses' bones, that they had been accidentally mingled with the fossils. Among the • I need not here state, that there is no kind of evidence to support the belief, that a horse existed in America previously to the age of Columbus. t Theory of the Earth, p. 281 (English translation). t Ossemens Fossiles, vol. iv., p. 147. ., Oct. 1833. ZOOLOGICAL PROVINCES. 151 remains brought home by Captain Beechcy from the west coast of the same continent, in the frozen region of 66o north, Dr. Buckland* has described the astragalus metacarpus, and metatarsus of the horse, which were associated with the remains of the Eleplzas primigenius, and of the fossil ox. Thus we have an elephant, an ox, and a horse (the species of the latter is only presumed to be identical), common to Europe and to North America. Very few species of living quadrupeds;!· which are altogether terrestrial in their habits, are common to the two continents, and these few are chiefly confined to the extreme frozen regions of the north. The separation, therefore, of the Asiatic and American zoological provinces appears formerly to have been less perfect than at present. The remains of the elephant and of the ox have been found on the banks of the Anadir (long. 175° E.), on the extreme part of Siberia, nearest the American coast: and the former remains, according to Chamisso, are common in the peninsula of Kamtschatka. On the opposite shores, likewise, of the narrow strait which divides these two great continents, we know, from the discoveries of Kotzebue and Beechey, that the remains of both animals occur aht~ndantly: and as Dr. Buckland has shown they are associated with the bones of the horse, the teeth of which animal in Europe, accordinp to Cuvier, accompany by thousands the remains of the pachydermata of the later periods. With these facts, we may safely look at this quarter, as the line of communication (now interrupted by the steady progress of geological change) by which the elephant, the ox, and the horse, entered America, and peopled its wide extent.t • See the admirable Appendix to Beechey's Voyage, p. 592 (quarto edition). t See Dr. Richardson's very interesting Report on North American Zoology for the British Association of 1836. :j: I do not here mean to fix on the more northern parts of the old world as the parent country of these two animals. I only want to point out the channel of communication-not the course of the stream- |