Dr. J. E. Gray on the Clawed Toads of Africa. 337 



edge of the orbit ; two rows of glands on the back of the neck, placed 

 rather obliquely to each other, and some scattered ones on the outer 

 side of them ; two series of short lines from the middle of the tem- 

 ples, continued over the shoulder, along the sides, over the base of 

 the thigh, to the upper surface of the vent ; the upper line in these 

 series is longitudinal, and the lower ones larger and transverse to the 

 direction of the upper line. On the under parts there is a lunate 

 series of arched linear glands across the throat and on each side of 

 the body, commencing by an arched line round the back of the axilla, 

 continued in a curved line, with the convex side of the curve down- 

 wards, along the side of the belly, and thence to the groin. 



The disposition of these glands will appear to be of some import- 

 ance in a zoological point of view when one studies the character of 

 the genus Silurana. These glands, especially those on the under- 

 side of the body, are much more distinct in some specimens than 

 they are in others ; but I suspect this depends on the season when 

 the specimen has been captured, and especially on the state and 

 manner in which the specimen has been preserved. 



The specimens in spirit rather vary in colour ; but this may de- 

 pend on the length of time that they have been in spirit, on the 

 exposure to which they have been submitted, and on the strength 

 of the spirit in which they were originally preserved. 



The specimens of an adult male and female from West Africa, 

 presented by Mr. Welwitsch, are of a uniform olive-brown above and 

 yellowish below, marbled with very distinct, unequal-sized, subsym- 

 metrically distributed olive spots. 



The specimen from the Cape, presented by Sir Andrew Smith, 

 which is in a rather soft state, is olive obscurely spotted above, pale 

 whitish grey beneath, obscurely marked with small darker spots. 



The adult specimen from Natal, collected by Mr. Ayres, and the 

 smaller specimen from West Africa are of a uniform olive-brown 

 above and pale grey-brown beneath, without any indication of spots. 



Mr. It. B. N. Walker (to whom we are indebted for the best ac- 

 count of the habits of the Gorilla, and who has brought to England 

 some most interesting animals from Western Africa) has lately been 

 living at Lagos, where he observed some Tadpoles that were deve- 

 loped in abundance in a pond adjoining his residence. He put some of 

 these hi spirits, and gave them to the Free Museum at Liverpool. 

 Mr. Moore having kindly sent me some of these specimens for exa- 

 mination, I was soon convinced that they had not before been ob- 

 served, and therefore sent a short notice of them to the ' Annals and 

 Magazine of Natural History' for September 1864, and named them, 

 from their resemblance to the genus Silurus, Silurana tropicalis. 



Some naturalists having expressed a doubt if the animals sent 

 home by Mr. Walker were not the young of the common Dactylethra 

 (an opinion that I entertained myself when I first saw them, and until 

 I had compared them with the papers on the subject), I have been 

 induced to reconsider the question, and to study the genus. This 

 study has led me to the conclusion that the two geographic species 

 of Dactylethra are but one, which is spread over the whole of South 



Ann. § Mag. N. Hist. Ser. 3. Vol.xv. 22 



