But more conclusive than all, is the discovery to which I have alluded, in relation to the elephant of Ceylon.  Down to a very recent period it was universally believed that only two species of the elephant are now in existence, the African and the Asiatic; distinguished by certain peculiarities in the shape of the cranium, the size of the ears, the ridges of the teeth, the number of vertebrae, and, according to Cuvier, in the number of nails on the hind feet.  The elephant of Ceylon was believed to be identical with the elephant of India.  But some few years back, TEMMINCK, in his survey of the Dutch possessions in the Indian Archipelago[1], announced the fact that the elephant which abounds in Sumatra (although unknown in the adjacent island of Java), and which had theretofore been regarded as the same species with the Indian one, has been recently found to possess peculiarities, in which it differs as much from the elephant of India, as the latter from its African congener.  On this new species of elephant, to which the natives give the name of gadjah, TEMMINCK has conferred the scientific designation of the Elephas Sumatranus.

[Footnote 1:  Coup d’Oeil General sur les Possessions Neerlandaises dans l’Inde Archipelagique.]

The points which entitle it to this distinction he enumerated minutely in the work[1] before alluded to, but they have been summarized as follows by Prince Lucien Bonaparte.

[Footnote 1:  TEMMINCK, Coup-d’oeil, &c., t. i. c. iv. p. 328.; t. ii. c. iii. p. 91.]

“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 vertebrae, 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 vertebrae (four), and with Indicus in that of the caudal ones, which are thirty-four."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Proceed.  Zool.  Soc.  London, 1849. p. 144, note.  The original description of TEMMINCK is as follows: 

“Elephas Sumatranus, Nob. ressemble, par la forme generale du crane a l’elephant du continent de l’Asie; mais la partie libre des intermaxillaires est beaucoup plus courte et plus etroite; les cavites nasales sont beaucoup moins larges; l’espace entre les orbites des yeux est plus etroit; la partie posterieur du crane au contraire est plus large que dans l’espece du continent.