90 BULLETIN NO VII. 
and at last had the anal lips, two muscular pouches and the small glands 
connected with them. My fortitude here giving out, and it growing 
dark, I adjourned the matter to the next day. 
When I resumed operations, on the parts now weighing only about two 
ounces out of a Mephitis of nine pounds, I had a strip of skin with the 
anal lips, the suspicious calices or cones in their cup-like cavities and the 
pouches. * * * JT began by severing the two muscular pouches and 
found no connection between them. Books say ‘the animal gives its 
peculiarand penetrating odor from two glands situated external to pelvis.’ 
I found the ‘glands’ to be clear muscular fibre, with not a particle of 
smell, ora traceof any glandular structure. Further to test the matter, I 
cut slowly to the middle of the mass of muscular, not glandular, fibres 
and came upon a thick, white leathery capsule like the crop of a chicken, 
with the source for the contents provided by the little glands about it. 
Now, putting on old clothes and sitting to the windward, I cut through 
this white capsule; a bright yellow fluid came out and I instantly felt that 
‘distance would lend enchantment to the view.’ But I was not to be 
baftied. So I dipped the point of my scalpel in the yellow fluid, put the 
tenth or twentieth part of a drop on a glass and covered it with another 
strip of glass, and placed it under a power of forty diameters in my 
microscope. The appearance was peculiar. It looked like meulten gold, 
or like quicksilver of the finest golden color. Pressure on the strips of 
glass made it flow like globules of melted gold. 
By a power of sixty diameters the same color still appeared, but seemed 
as if it would by a higher power resolve itself into globules, with peculiar 
markings. * * * To the eye, the peculiar and odoriferous secretion of 
this animal is of a pale bright glistening yellow, with specks floating in 
it. By the microscope it looks like a clear fluid, as water with masses of 
gold in it, and the specks like bubbles of air covered with gold, or rather 
air in golden sacs. The air I take to be the gas nascent from the golden 
fluid. * * * Another thing was a matter of interest. If I correctly 
made out the capsule of fluid, the commonly called ‘glands’ are the mus- 
cular tunic enveloping and capable of compressing the reservoir, and their 
sole use is to eject the liquid. The teat like projections have one large 
orifice for a distant jet of the substance, and also a strainer, with num- 
erous holes—like the holes in the cones of the human kidney—for a near 
but diffusive jetting of the matter. The substance is secreted by small 
dark glands, of small callibre, connected with the capsule by narrow 
ducts.” 
The technical peculiarities characteristic of the skunks are 
here collated. 
Skull. Dental formula: i. #:§,¢. 3:1, pm. $:8,(#:8), mM. 3:3 —18(1 $= 34(32)- 
The variation indicated in the premolar formula occurs in 
the genus Conepatus, where the number is usually (but, 
according to Coues, not always as once supposed) 3:3. A 
comparison of the inferior aspect of the skull of Mephitis with 
that of Putorius shows that there is no anterior extension of 
the orbital space and consequent elongation of the zygomatic 
arch. The encroachment on the palatal part of the maxillary 
