The Scottish Naturalist. 5 



ever, be observed that the scapula is less concave on the 

 posterior border, and the anterior is rather more convex than 

 is the case in the same bone of a half-grown common seal ; 

 the coracoid is much smaller than in that animal, while the 

 suprascapular epiphysis seemed to be broader cartilaginous 

 plates. Both the prescapular and postscapular fossa are mode- 

 rately developed. The os innominatum differs from that of 

 the half-grown common seal in being much shorter, its posterior 

 margin more circular, the pubic spine broader, and the thyroid 

 foramen wider in proportion to its length. The femur is also 

 shorter and slenderer than the corresponding bone of that 

 individual. The pelvic bones are more throughly ankylosed 

 than these bones are in the specimen above referred to. On 

 the other hand the supracondyloid foramen of the left humerus 

 is not quite perfect, while it is completely ossified on both arm 

 bones of that seal. It would seem, however, that in some 

 seals this canal is either never entirely closed by bone, or its 

 walls are afterwards absorbed during life — at any rate in oldish 

 animals it becomes much elongated. In two humeri of the 

 Grey Seal ( Halichcerus grypus) in my possession, and per- 

 taining to different animals, this structure is represented by 

 two spiculated fragments of bone, having their points directed 

 towards each other, but without nearly meeting together. The 

 imperfect condition of this foramen on the bones of these seals 

 seems to me to be pretty near the state in which it is generally 

 met with on the humeri of man. Those acquainted with the 

 literature of the Descent * and Antiquity of Man question t 

 will be aware of the interest and importance which have some- 

 what recently been attached to the occasional survival to our own 

 day in the human race, of the rudiment of a structure which finds 

 its normal development in the bones of the carnivora. It has 

 been estimated that it occurs in a more or less perfect condition, 

 in about one per cent, of recent European human skeletons. 

 In ancient skeletons it is more frequently met with. " Dupont t 

 found thirty per cent, of perforated bones in the caves of the 

 Valley of the Lesse, belonging to the reindeer period, and Le- 

 quay,:j: in a dolmen, at Argenteuil, observed twenty-five per 



*Darwin, Descent of Man, vol. I. tLyell, Principles of Geology, vol. II. 1872. 

 % Busk, International Congress of Prehist. Archaeology, 1868. 



