98
THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
Nearly all the first-discovered Eocene mammalian remains
from this country were described by Prof. (afterwards Sir)
Richard Owen, who derived his inspiration from Baron Cuvier's
remarkable researches among similar fossils from the Paris
Basin. Following the pioneer Cuvier, Owen began with implicit
faith in the possibility of determining the nature of isolated
fossil bones and teeth by comparison with those of existing
animals. He was thus at first led into several errors, among
which, the mistaking some teeth of a hoofed quadruped from
Kyson for those of a monkey, was perhaps the most remarkable.
The second discovery in the London Clay of Essex (1857), dis-
playing a skull in association with limb-bones, enabled him to
correct another of these errors. Owen, indeed, then realised
that "too much confidence" had been placed by Cuvier in
comparisons between fossil and recent teeth. Other discoveries
in Europe began to show that the Eocene mammals were much
less similar to modern mammals than had been inferred from the
study of fragments. Explorations in North America during the
last half century have provided so many nearly complete skeletons
of them that it is at last possible to understand their chief
characteristics and their meaning.2
The specimen already mentioned as having been found in
the London Clay of Essex in 1845 was a fragment of lower jaw
of a vegetable-feeder, containing two teeth dredged up between
St. Osyth and Harwich. It was secured by John Brown, of
Stanway, and through him passed to the British Museum. The
teeth were so peculiar that Owen had difficulty in deciding which
was the front, which the back of the jaw ; and the strange
manner in which each ridge of the tooth ended in cusps caused
him to name the animal to which the fossil belonged, Coryphadon
(Gr. peak-tooth).3 He concluded that it was a "Tapiroid
quadruped," which fed on succulent vegetation, and would be
somewhat larger than the existing tapirs. Numerous pieces of
Coryphadon were afterwards found in the Eocene of France,
and a limb-bone, with other fragments, was discovered in the
Woolwich Beds at Park Hill, Croydon.4 Whole skulls and
2 See specially H. F. Osborn, The Age of Mammals in Europe, Asia, and North America
(New York, 1910), and W. B. Scott, A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere
(New York, 1913).
3 R. Owen, A History of British Fossil Mammals and Birds, 1846, p. 299, figs. 103, 104,107.
4 E. T. Newton, Proc. Geol. Assoc, vol. viii. (1883), p. 254, pl. iii.