470 ANNUAL RECORD OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 



Oral Gestation in Amphibians. 



It has long been known that certain fishes carry their eggs 

 in their month, and thus protect them ; but no example of such 

 mode of gestation had been observed among Amphibians, re- 

 markable as they are for many peculiarities in gestation, or, 

 in fact, among any other vertebrates. Recently, however, a 

 Spanish naturalist, Mr. Espada, has found that an analogous 

 habit prevails in a peculiar Chilian toad known as the llhi- 

 noderma darwinu. This species has been claimed to be vi- 

 viparous on account of the discovery, in what was supposed 

 to be the abdomen, of living young, and thus to be exception- 

 al among the anurous Amphibians ; but this idea is now seen 

 to be the result of an error of observation. What is per- 

 haps most curious is that it is the organs of voice that are 

 modified for gestation. The male Anurans, as is general- 

 ly known, have a pair of vocal sacs or bladder-like struct- 

 ures opening near the angles of the mouth; and when they 

 croak, they inflate the sacs with air, and thus increase the 

 loudness of the voice. It is these organs that are subordi- 

 nated to protection of the brood in Rhinoderma, and for this 

 purpose they are greatly enlarged, commencing, as usual, at 

 the angles of the mouth, but extending forwards to the chin, 

 " and backwards over the abdomen, reaching high up on the 

 flanks, and meeting one another in the middle of the body." 

 In each of these sacs are harbored some five to fifteen young, 

 the smallest at the bottom and the largest near the apertures; 

 none of these have been observed with gills, and in the old- 

 est, which had attained a third of the length of the adult, the 

 intestines were well developed. Co-ordinate with the hy- 

 pertrophy of the vocal sacs and their new functions are the 

 abbreviation of the tongue and a peculiar form of the shoul- 

 der bones. 



Reptiles Nearest to Mammals. 



By most naturalists, so far as is known, it has been supposed 

 that the Pinosaurians were, of all known reptiles, those most 

 nearly related to mammals as well as to birds. Professor 

 Cope, however, has lately adopted a new view, and finds in 

 the Anomodontia the forms most resembling mammals, and 

 he regards those reptiles "as probably the ancestral group 

 from which the latter were derived. " The relationship, lie 



