by the most rigorous opponents of man’s antiquity—Elie de Beaumont,
Buekland, Brogniart, Lyell, Owen, and other illustrious palaeontologists—
are accepted. Since Roman days, bos longifrons no
longer roams the British isles; even if bos aurochs may yet have
escaped the yager’s bullet in Lithuanian thickets. Man and the
moa (dinornis giganteus) were formerly at war in ISTew Zealand: the
dodo vanished, during the 16th century, from Tristan d’Acunha;
leaving but a skull and a foot (if memory serves) to authenticate its
portrait in the Ashmolean Museum- at Oxford. So too has the
dronte expired at the Mauritius. Of the cpinornis we know not
whether living natives of Madagascar—that unaccountable island to
which, Commersan (Bougainville’s naturalist) happily says, “ Nature
seems to have withdrawn, as to a sanctuary, therein to work upon
other models than those which she had mastered elsewhere ”—still
feast on its colossal eggs. And, taking, again our oldest historical
country, and the one with which I happen to be somewhat acquainted,
where, in Egypt, is now the ibis religiosa,2m of yore as common
as Guinea-hens with us ? Who but an unconquerable botanist, amid
the fens of Menzaleh, could point out the cyperus papyrus; or any
where along the Lower Rile discover an indigenous faba JEgypti-
aca ? Yet the former was once the main instrument of Pharaonic
civilization; being with the latter, the “primitive nutriment of man,”
and symbolizing “ the first origin of things.”293 Six hundred years
have passed since Abd-el-Lateef deplored the extinction of the little
clump of sacred perseas languishing then at Shoobra-shabieh. Where,
before his day, there had been thousands, now curiosity doubts over
but one sample—in my time, withering in the garden of the Greek
patriarch at Cairo. Emblem of Thoth, minister of Osiris, guardian
of the plummet in the mystical scales of Amenthi, the cynocephalus
hamadryas, if still an unruly denizen of Abyssinia, Arabia, and Persia,
no more steals in Egypt the sycamore fig :294 hippopotami hsive fled
up to Dongola; and wary crocodiles are not shot at lower down than
the tomb of Moorad-bey, last of the brave, at Girge. Like the wolf
in England, or his dog in Erin, one genus is extinct; the other all but
s o : or else, as withii/ the territories of our vast Republic—compared
to which296 “ the domains of the House of Hapsburg are but a patch
on the earth’s surface”-—the native rattlesnake flees before the imported
hog, the bison disappears before the face of starving Indians;
292 During 15 years of a sportsman’s life in Egypt, 1 never saw one alive. My old friend
Mr. Harris has latterly been more fortunate. Cf. Proceedings of the Acad, of Nat. Sciences,
Philadelphia, 185Q.
293 H e r o d o t u s , ii. 92:—H o r u s A p o l l o , i. 30:—G l id d o n , Otia AEgypiiaca, p. 69.
294 R o s e l l in i , Monumenti, for the plates. 295 W e b s t e r to H u l z e m a n , 1851
and these last relics of succumbing savagism are melting away
before whiskey, Bowie-knives, and Colt-revolvers ; so parallely, in
many branches—botanical, zoological, and human—of Raturai His-
toiy, the A uthor of Rature, within historical recollection, has ever
vindicated her eternal and relentless law of “ formation, generation
dissolution. 296 ° ’
The tableau of osseous and industrial vestiges of bimanes met with
over the world, supplied by Marcel de Serres,"9 brings down fossil
discovery to some twenty years ago. Much of what has been done
since, particularly in America, is summed up by our collaborator
Usher. My comments, therefore, may be restricted, after indicating
fresher materials, to these and some few amongst the elder facts.
Homenclature, as above shown, being passably vague, it may be
well to come to an understanding with the reader upon the senses
of some words m our terminology; taking M. de Serres for our
guide.298
“ These (geological) formations having, then, been wrought by
phenomena of an order totally different from the tertiaiy, one must
necessarily designate, under a particular name, those organic remains
found m them. At first, it had been proposed to give to these débris
the name of sub-fossils, so as thereby to indicate their newness, relatively
to the true fossils. Preferable it has, notwithstanding, seemed
to us, to designate them under the term of humatiles ;m a denomination
derived from the Latin word humatus, of which the meaning
is nearly the same as that of fossilis; with this difference, that the
ormer expresses the idea of a body buried in an accidental rather
tnan m a natural manner.”
„ Itrmust be allowed that the last sentence somewhat establishes
a distinction without a difference ;” but I presume M. Serres to
f t * oATNB Knight> Ini uirV int0 the Symbolic Language of Ancient Art and Mythology
W B J 0*’ l ’ PP' 25’ 107’ 112’ 18°"1’ 19°’ &C‘:- bUt Uemams of the Worship of Priapus, lately existing at lsermia, NeaSpPleeds;a li*n ““ t wKo* LAeccttoeurnst toof tSkier
Jos. Bankes and Sir Wm. Hamilton, LondoD, 4to., 1786 ; pp. 107-22.
w Essai sur les Cavernes (supra, note 182), pp. 194-7.
* °!i-’ p- 216: —see tables illustrative of the chemical composition of humatile and
oijossil bones, p. 93.
J 299 0<iIIjVIE’ ¡1 Dictionary, English, technological and scientific, Glasgow, 4to, 1858 •
-.pp. 944-6: — (Humus, soil) “ H u m u s , a term synonymous with mould” — “ H um ’a t e ■ a
compound formed by the union of humus with a salifiable basis. The humus of soils is
onstdered to unite chiefly with ammonia, forming a humale of that substance.”—p 790
[ ami, fosstlu,, from fodio, fossus, to dig,) “ more commonly the petrified forms of plante
„ n ammal8’ whleh ooour in the strata that- compose the surface of our globe” — U p 286
i1Xn1 oouTr larn grueamgaei.n8’” 1 have not met> hoWCTer’ with the form “ humatile" in works’written