1816] Royal Institute of France. 463 
ssesses all the properties ascribed by the ancients to their lynx. 
The leoncornutte and the catoblepas, two animals to which the 
ancients ascribed a monstrous conformation and noxious qualities, 
appear to him to be only the result of bad descriptions made by 
ignorant travellers of that animal in the interior of Africa, to which 
travellers have given the name of gnu (antelope gnu, Linn.), whose 
singular shape, fierce look, and the pointed hair on its snout and 
mane, must have often rendered it an object of terror. 
Of the five unicorns spoken of by the ancients, M. Cuvier sup- 
poses that the first four, the ass of the Indies, the unicorn horse, 
the unicorn ex, and the monoceros, properly so called, are merely 
the rhinoceros differently disfigured by the relations of travellers 
and merchants. . 
He shows that all which the ancients have said of the asp of 
Egypt, the asp by excellence, belongs completely to that species of 
viper with a large neck called coluber haje, the history of which is 
50 well related by Geoffroy in his great work on Egypt. 
He reconciles the contradictions of the ancients respecting the 
dolphin by showing that they gave that name to two very different 
animals; one, which is our present dolphin (delphinis delphis, Lin.); 
another, which belongs to the genus of sharks or sea dogs. 
The greater number of the fables respecting the hyena and 
jchneumon are explained by the singularity of their conformation ; 
even the pretended continuity of the vertebree of the neck in the 
hyena is in some measure true. The extreme rigidity of the muscles 
of the neck frequently occasion ankyloses between the cervical ver . 
tebre, and M. Cuvier has observed examples of it. 
All. the world knows the little animal called musaraigne or 
musette, which has a considerable external resemblance to a small 
mouse, only that its snout is more pointed, and its ears much 
smaller. But though it has been examined and dissected by several 
naturalists, all the peculiarities of its organization had not been 
observed. M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire has just discovered that on each 
side under the skin there is a peculiar gland, which exudes a 
glutinous matter by a series of pores surrounded with hairs, which 
are larger and stiffer than on the rest of the body, and which may 
easily be perceived by touching the body. 
M. Cuvier, who has resumed his researches into the anatomy of 
the molusca, has this year read to the Class a memoir on the anatifes 
and balanes; and another on several genera of shells approaching 
the patella, the oscabrions, and the haliotides. 
The anatifes and the balanes presented organs of Beneration and 
a nervous system very different from what is observed in the molusca 
in general. ‘The nervous system, as well as the jaws, would bring 
these animals near to the insects. 
The haliotides, the patella, and the oscabrions, have other sin- 
gularities. Their sexes are not separated, as it is in the buccine 
and other aquatic turbinated animals. Nor are they united so as to 
require a reciprocal fecundation, as the snails and the aplysia, but 
