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AMPHITHERIUM. » 
and experienced Physiologist and Comparative Anato- 
mist. 
The following dissentient opinions have, however, subse- 
quently been recorded, and ought here to be noticed. Mr. 
Ogilby, the learned Secretary of the Zoological Society, in 
a paper read before the Geological Society, at the con- 
clusion of my second memoir, after calling attention to the 
relative extent and position of the incisive and canine teeth 
in the fossil jaws, as objections, ‘‘ because, among all 
Mammals, the incisors occupy the front of the jaw, and 
stand at right angles to the line of the molars,” stated 
“After a due consideration of the whole of the evidence, 
that the fossils present so many important and distinctive 
characters in common with Mammals on the one hand, 
and cold-blooded animals on the other, that he does not 
think Naturalists are justified, at present, in pronouncing 
definitively to which Class the fossils really belong.”* 
Thus the question, in the opinion of the Naturalist just 
cited, appeared not to have been advanced beyond the 
doubts of M. de Blainville, which had led to the examina- 
tions and conclusions dissented from. Professor Grant has 
recorded a more decided opinion on the mooted question, im 
his ‘‘ General View of the Characters and the Distribution 
of extinct animals,” published in Thompson’s British Annual 
for 1839. “The jaws and teeth of Amphitheriwm, mis- 
taken,” he says, “by some for a mammiferous Didelphis, 
occur in the Stonesfield Oolite; they are distinctly asso- 
ciated with Trigonia and other marine shells, and are 
imagined to have been detached and mutilated by drifting. 
* Proceedings of the Geological Society, Dec. 1838, Mr. Ogilby has lately 
informed me that his opinion, with regard to the non-mammalian nature of the 
Stonesfield fossils, was expressed in the above abstract more strongly than he 
intended, but I am not aware that he afterwards corrected or published any modi- 
fication of his views. 
