“This species is perfectly intermediate between the Indian and African, especially in the shape of the skull, and will certainly put an end to the distinction between _Elephas_ and _Loxodon_, with those who admit that anatomical genus; since although the crowns of the teeth of _E. Sumatranus_ are more like the Asiatic animal, still the less numerous undulated ribbons of enamel are nearly quite as wide as those forming the lozenges of the African. The number of pairs of false ribs (which alone vary, the true ones being always six) is fourteen, one less than in the _Africanus_, _one_ more than in the _Indicus_; and so it is with the dorsal vertebræ, which are twenty in the _Sumatranus_ (_twenty-one_ and _nineteen_ in the others), whilst the new species agrees with _Africanus_ in the number of sacral vertebræ (_four_), and with _Indicus_ in that of the caudal ones, which are _thirty-four_.”[5] Professor SCHLEGEL of Leyden, in a paper lately submitted by him to the Royal Academy of Sciences of Holland, (the substance of which he obligingly communicated to me, through Baron Bentinck the Netherlands Minister at this Court), confirmed the identity of the Ceylon elephant with that found in the Lampongs of Sumatra. The osteological comparison of which TEMMINCK has given the results was, he says, conducted by himself with access to four skeletons of the latter; and the more recent opportunity of comparing a living Sumatran elephant with one from Bengal, served to establish other though minor points of divergence. The Indian species is more robust and powerful; the proboscis longer and more slender; and the extremity, (a point in which the elephant of Sumatra resembles that of Africa,) is more flattened and provided with coarser and longer hair than that of India. Professor SCHLEGEL, adverting to the large export of elephants from Ceylon to the Indian continent, which has been carried on from time immemorial, suggests the caution with which naturalists, in investigating this question, should first satisfy themselves whether the elephants they examine are really natives of the mainland, or whether they have been brought to it from the islands. “The extraordinary fact,” he observes in his letter to me, “of the identity thus established between the elephants of Ceylon and Sumatra, and the points in which they are found to differ from that of Bengal, leads to the question whether all the elephants of the Asiatic continent belong to one single species; or whether these vast regions may not produce in some quarter as yet unexplored the one hitherto found only in the two islands referred to? It is highly desirable that naturalists who have the means and opportunity, should exert themselves to discover, whether any traces are to be found of the Ceylon elephant in the Dekkan; or of that of Sumatra in Cochin China or Siam.”