Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/597

 work, viz. whether from a Tapir which continued to exist in China to within the historic period, or from figures and descriptions, brought home by some Chinese voyager, of the species now existing in the Malaccan promontory and in Sumatra.

Mr. Swinhoe writes to me that the Tapir " has long since ceased to be an animal known to the Chinese, and has given rise to many fables, which are repeated in Chinese dictionaries, and in the great Chinese Herbal, ' Pun-tsao-Kang.'"

It is satisfactory, therefore, to have acquired indisputable evidence that a Tapir, nearly allied to, but larger than the Sumatran kind, has existed in China, and has left its remains in conditions of preservation and entombment corresponding with those of large spelaean mammals, some of which were the latest to die out, and others still exist, in Europe.

It also adds to the illustration afforded by the existing Malaccan Tapirs of the original tract of dry land from which the Malaccan peninsula is nearly, and Sumatra quite insulated.

Chalicotherium sinense, Ow.

The last specimen from Mr. Swinhoe's Chinese spelaean teeth, that will be noticed in the present paper, is an upper molar of the right side, the last of the series, m 3 (Pl. XXIX. figs. 7, 8, 9 & 10), with the pattern of grinding-surface of that genus of Anoplotherioid from the Eppelsheim miocene which Kaup distinguished and named Chalicotherium*.

In the upper true molars of this genus the crown has an outer and an inner division; the outer one presents an anterior (a) and a posterior (b) lobe, the former the larger ; both are hollowed externally (f, f'), with a thick convex dividing bulge (n), the indent (f) being bounded by a similar convexity (o) anteriorly.

The coronal projection of each lobe is angular (fig. 7, a b), and inclines to the apex inwardly, as in Anoplotherium, fig. 11. The outer surface of the hind lobe (f') looks obliquely backward and outward, and is turned most backward in the last molar (as in fig. 7), and to a greater degree than in Anoplotherium. The inner division of the crown consists of the postinternal lobe (d) and the mammilloid cone (m) — an antinternal lobe not being marked off, as in Paloplotherium and Anoplotherium (fig. 11, c), by the extension of the fissure (I) from the fossa (h). The valley e (Pl. XXIX. fig. 7) is wide and deep, and is joined at the fossa (h) by the valley k, which is of similar size ; the entry to each valley is partially bounded by a development (r, r) of the cingulum, or basal ridge. The postinternal lobe (d) is marked off, as usual, by an indent or valley from b.

The cingulum may be traced from the low ridge along the fore side of the base of a to its thicker portion (r) at the entry of the valley, k, whence it is continued more feebly along the inner side of the base of m to join the ridge at the entry of the valley e: it thence extends just recognizably along the inner side of d, where it subsides. The cingulum reappears along the rear of the base of the lobe b


 * Ossemens fossiles de Darmstadt: obl. fol. 1833.