Geological Transactions. 567 



in question to be " some species of the modern genus Tabanus, 

 probably the Tabanus bovinus, Linn." With the insect, 



cui nomen Asilo 



Romanum est, CEstron Graii vertere vocantes ; 

 Asper, acerba sonans, 



the poet Dryden appears to have been better acquainted than 

 most of the modern Natnralists, since he thus renders the above 

 passage, 



(Estros the Grecians call, Asilus we : 

 A fierce, loud-buzzing breeze ; 



This, if we may trust Mouffet's description, is the English syno- 

 nyme for the Haematopota pluvialis,(a Tabanus of Linnaeus,) which 

 approaches much more nearly to the modern Tabani, than to the 

 CEstrus of the great Swedish master and his successors in Ento- 

 mology; which latter in no one respect, except in its being 

 dipterous and infesting cattle, at all corresponds with the attri- 

 butes assigned to the ancient CEstrus by the Greek and Roman 

 poets and tragedians. 



Transactions of the Geological Society. Second Series. 

 Vol. i. Part the Second. 4to. pp. 279 (175—454), 

 with twenty-jive plates. 



Closely connected as many of the articles contained in the 

 present volume are with the studies of the Zoologist, there are 

 none we apprehend which he will peruse with so much interest as 

 those that relate to the Plesiosaurus and the Megalosaurus, by the 

 Rev. W. D. Conybeare and Professor Buckland. The former 

 gentleman, it will be remembered, had from detached bones, pro- 

 cured even from distant localities, collected together a number of 

 facts, which induced him to publish in the Geological Trans- 

 actions for 1821, an account of a new fossil genus of Reptilia, 

 under the denomination of Plesiosaurus. It was natural, he re- 

 marks, that many persons should have suspected that by the 

 juxtaposition of incongruous members he should have been led to 



