BY J. J. FLETCHER. 183 



the somewhat inflated and pretentious originals. And the clue 

 to what has happened may be oflfered in a few words. 



Both Hutton and Sedgwick — the former as long ago as 1876 — 

 had found that sometimes the New Zealand Peripatus deposited 

 eggs, and being cautious naturalists and duly mindful of a certain 

 time-honoured wise saying — which a recent observer has con- 

 clusively shown to be every whit as applicable to the Victorian 

 Peripatus as to the ordinary barn-door fowl — they did not 

 commence operations by straightway proceeding to count the 

 chicks — or at least not aloud and in print — on the very day on 

 which the eggs were found some months in advance of the date 

 at which even on a very moderate estimate, and under the most 

 favourable circumstances possible, the young could be expected to 

 hatch, if indeed that were to happen at all : on the contrary, 

 they first waited to see what happened, and then talked, not 

 about what they had expected to happen, but what they actually 

 found to have happened ; and so Hutton says " Although vivi- 

 parous, the eggs are often extruded before development is 

 complete; but these always die " [Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist. (4) 1876, 

 XVIII, p. 362], and Sedgwick in his Monograph on Peripatus says 

 he can corroborate Hutton. This, it might not unreasonably be 

 expected, would be enough to put subsequent egg-finders on their 

 guard about discussing with confidence — in print at any rate — 

 the possibilities of such eggs before, instead of after, the hatching 

 of the young. Now, on July 31st, 1891, Dr. Dendy found a 

 batch of Victorian Peripatus eggs — the only Australian Peripatus 

 eggs anybody has ever met with — and two of his papers about 

 them are dated July 31st, not 1892 but 1891, a thii'd was read 

 on August 10th, 1891, and the fourth on August 13th, 1891, but 

 bears a postscript of date September 4th, 1891 ; whereas the 

 eggs at the very earliest were not expected to hatch before the 

 end of October, and even at that particular early period on quite 

 erroneous grounds. Moreover, no one of them contains any 

 reference whatever to the experiences of Hutton and Sedgwick 

 with the eggs of the New Zealand Peripatus ; and Dr. Dendy 

 argues as if the eggs found by himself were the only Peripatus 

 eggs ever met with, as if he knew for certain that they were 



