518 Chronicles of Science. | July, 
Consul at Porto Rico, had offered, through Lieut.-Colonel Cavan, to 
obtain for the Society some living Manatees (Dugongs), and that 
arrangements were being made for the transport of the animals to 
this country. 
Amongst the papers descriptive of new collections, read by the 
Secretary (the specimens being, in some cases, exhibited), was one of 
birds collected by Rev. H. B. Tristram, now in Palestine. Amongst 
these were two new species, which Mr. Tristram proposed to call 
Passer Moubiticus, and Caprimulgus Tamarioca. Also a paper refer- 
ring to a collection made by Mr. G. H. White, in the vicinity of 
Mexico, amongst which were several additions to the avi-fauna of 
that country, and other papers describing single examples of special 
interest to zoologists. 
At the meeting on the 22nd of March, Dr. Gimther read the 
first part of an account of a large collection of fishes made by Capt. 
Dow, and Messrs. Salvin and Gorman, at Panama, among which were 
many new and interesting species. He pointed out the structure, and 
mode of operation of a poison apparatus in a new species of fish of 
the genus Thalassophryne, belonging to the family Batrachide, which 
it was proposed to call T. reticulata. The poison organs consist of 
four hollow spines, two of them being dorsal, and the others formed 
by the acute termination of the operculum posteriorly. The canal in 
the interior of the spines terminates in each case in a sac, in which 
the poisonous fluid is collected. In the specimens examined by Dr. 
Giinther, which had been preserved in spirits for nine months, the 
slightest pressure of the sac, situated on the operculum, caused a 
whitish fluid contained in it to flow freely from the hollow extremity 
of the opercular spine. 
In the account of this apparatus, which appeared in the last 
number of the ‘ Natural History Review,’ it was stated that, “although 
many fishes have long had the reputation of being considered poisonous, 
no trace of any poisonous organ has been detected in them.” This is 
an error. In the Proceedings of the Liverpool Literary and Philoso- 
phical Society, No. V. p. 156, is an excellent account of the anatomy 
of the stinging organs of the sting-fish, or Lesser Weever (‘Trachinus 
vipera), by Mr. I. Byerley, F.L.S., Seacombe, Birkenhead, accom- 
panied by illustrative plates. In this paper the existence of poison 
glands in connection with the dorsal spines is demonstrated, and the 
character of these organs in our well-known British fish appears to 
be very similar to that described by Dr. Giinther, in the Thalassophryne 
from Panama. 
One or two communications of interest have been made by Dr. J. 
K. Gray, F.R.S. On the 24th May, that gentleman described the 
cetaceous animals which have been observed in the seas surrounding 
the British isles, of which he enumerated twenty-eight species as 
having occurred on the coast of this country. At the same meeting 
he read a note upon Urocyelus, a new genus of terrestrial gasteropo- 
dous mollusks, discovered by Dr. Kirk (of Dr. Livingstone’s expedi- 
tion), in the Zambesi river. On March 8th, Dr. Gray described a 
new species of tortoise, discovered by Mr. Osbert Salvin, in Guatemala, 
