they exist in a wild or domesticated state throughout the greater part of the known world.
Martin says:—That the wild hog is the source of our ordinary domestic race cannot be disputed; and as little can we doubt its extreme antiquity. The hog has survived changes which have swept multitudes of pachydermatous animals from the surface of our earth. It still maintains an independent existence in Europe, and presents the same characters, both physical and moral, which the earliest writers, whether sacred or profane, have faithfully delineated. The domestic stock has indeed been more or less modified by long culture, but the wild species remains unaltered, insomuch that the fossil relics of its primitive ancestors may be identified by comparison with the bones of their descendants.
The fossil relics of the genus sus have been found in the miocene and also in the pliocene deposits of the tertiary system of Lyell. Kaup, for example, has described fossil bones of the genus sus from the miocene Eppelsheim sand, in which they were associated with those of the mastodon and dinotherium; and MM. Croizet and Jobert, in their account of the fossils of Auvergne, describe and figure the fossil bones of a species of hog, which, as was satisfactorily proved, must have lived coëxistent with and on the same locality as extinct elephants and mastodons. According to these geologists, the facial part of the fossil hog discovered by them is relatively shorter than in the existing species; hence, under the supposition that their fossil animal might have been distinct, they conferred upon it the title of aper (sus) Avernensis. How far this distinctiveness is real, yet remains to be seen; at all events, Professor Owen, in his valuable work on British fossil mammalia, places the sus Avernensis, with a query, as one of the synonyms of the cochon fossile of Cuvier, sus scrofa fossilis of Von Meyer (Palæologica, p. 80,) sus priscus of Goldfuss (Nova Acta Acad. Nat. Car., t. xi., pt. 2, p. 482,) the fossil hog of Dr. Buckland, and the sus scrofa, Owen, in Report of British Association, 1843, p. 228.
With reference to the fossil remains of the hog, Professor Owen thus writes:—"When Cuvier communicated his memoir on the fossil bones of the hog to the French Academy, in 1809, he had met with no specimens from formations less recent than the mosses, or turbaries and peat-bogs, and knew not that they had been found in the drift associated with the bones of elephants. He repeats this observation in the edition of the Ossemens Fossiles, in 1822; but in the additions to the last volume, puolished in 1825, Cuvier cites the discovery by M. Bourdet de la Nièvre of a fossil jaw of a sus, on the east bank of the lake of Neufchatel, and a fragment of the uppei jaw from the cavern at Sundwick, in Westphalia, described by Professor Goldfuss.
"Dr. Buckland includes the molar teeth and a large tusk of
