“At Watlington-park, Oxfordshire, at fifty or sixty feet depth, many whole oaks, hazel-nuts, a stag’s-head and antlers, were found, and on the same spot two Roman urns[55].”
“In Oxfordshire there is a tumulus which has become a perfect mount of stone.”
“Ralph, the brother of Earl Widdrington, showed me many human bones taken from whole skeletons, with British beads, chains, iron rings, and brass bits of bridles, dug up in a quarry at Blankney, Lincolnshire, which was probably plain mould when these old corpses of the Britons were interred: and I Saw many human bones and armour, with Roman coins, fibluæ &c., found in a stone-pit in Hunstanton-park, Norfolk, belonging to Sir Nicholas L’Estrange[56].”
Very numerous instances could be added, in order to prove that the local circumstances, when skeletons of these quadrupeds are found, are not of a nature to disprove the historical origin of fossil bones. From the highest authority we learn, that the “bones of species which are apparently the same with [p353] those that still exist alive, are never found except in the latest alluvial depositions, or in the fissures of caverns and rocks, in places where they may have been overwhelmed by debris, or even buried by man[57].”
Thus it appears that a comparative view of the exact species now living, with that of the fossil remains, is what we must depend on to decide whether the fossil kinds may not be still in existence.
With respect to the very numerous theories of the earth, the last, by Werner, has been confidently quoted in opposition to the writer’s historical proofs[58]. But Werner himself, before his death (in 1817), tacitly acknowledged that it is not a tenable doctrine, and which is clearly indicated by the compilers of REES’s Cyclopedia[59], although it is generally allowed to be the best extant. This hypothesis was formed on a circumscribed view of the strata in Saxony, but it is found to be quite inapplicable, in America for instance[60]. To account for fossil bones of elephants, &c., being found high in the north, the American author who discovered this defect in the geological doctrine, conjectures that those large quadrupeds may have migrated, like the buffalos, during the change of seasons. This notion, however, would not apply to Asia, the native countries of those animals being well supplied with leaves or other food the year round.
With these prefatory remarks some historical proofs are offered, for the probability of the following animals found in a fossil state, not being of extinct species, beginning with the
ELEPHANT.
“On sinking the foundation for a mill, near the side of a small brook in the Bishop of Kilmore’s lands, at Maghery, [p354] eight miles from Belturbet, in the north of Ireland, A.D. 1715, four large teeth were found, with a piece of the under jawbone and part of the skull of a young elephant. The teeth were more solid and petrified than when in a natural state.”