58 APPENDIX. 



College of Surgeons for a manuscript, which Professor Owen 

 had promised to leave out for me (his description of Mr. 

 Wood's quadrumanous tooth), and then unexpectedly found 

 Professor Owen still in town. In the course of conversation , 

 I named to Professor Owen my having brought up another 

 opossum's tooth, which I was going to describe in the suc- 

 ceeding number of my Journal, and Professor Owen then 

 observed to me that before pronouncing the first fossil tooth 

 as positively belonging to an opossum, he intended, when it 

 again came into his hands, carefully to compare it with the 

 teeth of some quadrumanous genera. I am unable to state 

 what were the exact words used by Professor Owen, but his 

 remark distinctly implied a suspicion that the first tooth ori- 

 ginally referred by him to an opossum, might possibly be the 

 molar of a quadnimanous animal ; and at the time, 1 naturally 

 concluded, that this doubt on the mind of Professor Owen, 

 originated in his having determined the generic relations of a 

 second mammiferous tooth, subsequently submitted to his 

 examination, to be undoubtedly quadnimanous. And as it 

 appears that the molars of the Quadrumana, and those of the 

 opossums, in some instances so nearly resemble, that without 

 the most careful examination, they may be mistaken the one 

 for the other, a doubt as to whether the first tooth ( of which 

 it is admitted no scrupulous comparison was made), might, 

 perhaps, prove to be quadrumanous instead of marsupial, 

 would seem almost of necessity to be involved in the subse- 

 quent identification of a second tooth, from the same locality 

 as the molar of a monkey. However slight this doubt might 

 be, upon Professor Owen's return to London in October, the 

 first tooth having, in the meanwhile, been again placed in 

 his hands, such a comparison was undertaken, when the fossil 

 in question proved to be the tooth of a monkey, and not of 

 an opossum, as he had originally supposed ; and under the 

 circumstances just referred to, it was by no means unlikely 

 that my allusion to my intended publication of a second opos- 

 sum's tooth should elicit from Professor Owen a casual inti- 

 mation of this doubt, although at this distance of time, the 

 fact of his having done so may easily have escaped his recol- 

 lection. The possibility of any " confusion of dates" on my 

 part, is put at once out of the question, by the circumstance 

 of my not having seen or communicated with Professor Owen, 

 from the 25th of August last, until my anival in London a 

 few days since ; and also the fact of my knowing nothing 

 whatever about the new determination of the first tooth, 

 until the announcement of that determination in Mr. Taylor's 

 journal for the present month. 



