LIFE OF FLOWER 131 



proportion to the whole series of animal and vegetable 

 forms which have existed in past ages. Secondly, that, 

 notwithstanding all that has been said, and most justly 

 said, of the necessary imperfection of the geological 

 record, we may hope that there is still so much pre- 

 served that the study of the course of events which 

 have led up to the present condition of life on the globe, 

 may have a great future before it." 



The subsequent discoveries of fossil mammalian re- 

 mains in such enormous quantities in Patagonia, and still 

 later in the Libyan desert, have rendered this utterance 

 almost prophetic. 



During the same year (1876) appeared, in the Philoso- 

 phical ^Transactions, a notice by Flower of the seals and 

 cetaceans obtained during the Transit of Venus expeditions 

 of 1874 anc * l %75- The year 1876 likewise witnessed 

 the publication, in the Proceedings of the Zoological 

 Society, of an article on the skulls of the various exist- 

 ing species of rhinoceroses, in which it was shown that 

 the number of such species had been altogether unjusti- 

 fiably exaggerated by the late Dr. J. E. Gray and other 

 writers, and that in all probability there were really not 

 more than five. Certain characters connected with the 

 postero-lateral region of the skull were also described, 

 which served to divide these species into groups. A 

 further contribution to our knowledge of the skulls of 

 the rhinoceroses was made by Flower in 1878, when he 

 described, in the same journal, the skull of an Indian 

 specimen, which it was thought might be the Rhinoceros 

 lasiotis of Dr. Sclater now known to be (as then sug- 

 gested) merely a local race of the two-horned ' R. 

 sumatrensis. 



