The Toledo chronicle. [volume] (Toledo, Tama County, Iowa) 1873-1924, 1874-09-10


PRor OWEN recently delivered lect-
ure in the British Museum TO a number
OF workingmen connected with the Work
ingmen's Club and Institute, and con-
Quoted by Mr.. Hodgson Pratt The sub
ject of the lecture was Extinct Ami
mails" although the professor almost
confined his remarks to the fossil ele-
plants. He began by directing atten-
ton to the tusks and skull of the Ele-
phas Primogenus,' which had been elab-
Grated in the British Museum from sand
stone blasted some forty years ago in the
formation of the Jumna Canal to point
900 feet above the Indian Ocean. Ev.
cry bit of the original ivory and bony
substance had passed aw az, and had been
replaced by particles of stone, but the
texture of the original ivory, which was
peculiar, was manifest with the aid Of
the micrescops &s
The Professor explained the1cxistence
of the immense tusks in this fossil by
the supposition that when it roamcd the
forest no human beings existed on the
earth, SO that it lived at ease and with
out fear, and under these conditions de-
vclopcd its tusks to the fullest size. But
when these conditions were altered, and
the elephant could not appear except
under terror of that wrctchcd little
biped, man, and his rifle, the nervous
system was not allowed the quiet and
I'D
was not that development in existing an
imals that was to be found in the fossil
types. lie supposed that this Indian
elephant had died a natural death, and
there was no doubt that the whole Him
alayan chain, the highest in the world
had been raised since that old elephant
had lived, because in them, at greater
heights than the quarry in which it
was found, were discovered not only fos
sill elephants, but hippopotami, which re-
quired lakes and rivers to live in, and
also fossil giraffes. Similar evidence was
to be found in the Alps, the Pyrenees and
the Andes. When they came to apply
their own trumpery way of reckoning
time, they had some evidence of nearly
5000 years of history; but that was
mere hour, minute, compared with the
lapse of time involved in the production
OF the phenomena to which he referred.
Therefore the real value of these speci-
mems was not the mere interest and
curiosity which attached to them as such,
but the light which they threw on much
larger questions, viz: The immense
duration Of times past and the changes
which had taken place in the surface of
the earth by the upheaval and subsistence
of the land
The learned professor, referring to an
other specimen which had been found at
llford, remarked that elephants were at
one time abundant in England, and that
when this was so England must have
formed part of a continent in connection
with Holland and the North of Europe.
Having given other proofs of the subsi-
dencc, rs the discovery of submarine
forest at the mouth of the Tyne, with
the antlers of deer and the horns of gi-
S"'iN o<ASA, duu tuC VI Tic
estate of the old Saxon Earl of Selsea,
as shown by the transfercnce of the re-
mains of the Saxon saints to Chichester
Cathedral, he briefly referred to the fos-
slls OF gigantic birds found in New Zea-
land and Madagascar, whose eggs would
require hat for an egg cup, and then
took leave of his audience.