Miscellaneous. 415 



forgotten. These Batrachia, furnished with branchiee, reproducing 

 in a very usual fashion, seemed to have attained their definitive form ; 

 and in consequence of this belief they were classed in a particular 

 group, the Perennibranchia. In 1865 M. A. Dumeril saw the axo- 

 lotls lose their branchiae and become transformed in the same way 

 as the larvae of the Tritons and Salamanders ; they became Ambhj- 

 stomata, the name given long before to certain Batrachia the meta- 

 morphoses of which were not known. For more than ten years these 

 animals displayed no aptitude for reproduction. 



In the autumn of 1874 the new menagerie of the Museum was 

 established ; and then it was endeavoured to furnish the animals with 

 varied situations in order that they might follow the impulses of their 

 nature ; from this moment the Amblystomes have led a more active 

 life. M, L. Yaillant, who was in Aiigust last, as Professor at the 

 Museum, called to the direction of the Menagerie of Reptiles, has 

 taken all imaginable care for the observarion of biological pheno- 

 mena ; and it is thus that he has just obtained the reproduction of 

 the Amblystomes. He proposes to foUow, with all possible attention, 

 the phases of the development of the larvse, which, no doubt, will 

 soon be hatched. 



Henceforward we have evidence that the Batrachian which is 

 successively axolotl and Amhlystoma does not by any means depart 

 from the category of many cold-blooded animals, which, being capa- 

 ble of reproducing when young, nevertheless do not cease to be 

 fertile when they are completely adult. — Comptes Mendus, March 27, 

 1876, p. 916. 



On supposed Emh'yos of Ichthyosaurus. 

 By Prof. Peter Merian. 



In 1824, in his memoir ' De Ichthyosauri spcciminibus,' and 

 again in 1828, in his fossil ReptiUaof Wiirttemberg, J. G. Jager gives 

 a plate showing a small Ichthyosaurus enclosed within the ribs of 

 another specimen about four times as large. As the head of the 

 smaller individual was directed towards the posterior extremity of 

 the larger one, Jager thought that it might be the skeleton of an em- 

 bryo still in its original position within the body of the mother, and 

 hence that the Ichthyosaurus in question might be viviparous. This 

 view he laid before the meeting of German naturalists in 1842, and 

 afterwards published in the ' Miinchner gelehrte Anzeigen ' in 

 1852 (p. 33), when he also called attention to a similar observation 

 made in England by Mr. J. Channing Pierce, and communicated by 

 him to this Journal (Ann. Nat. Hist. ser. 1, vol. xvii. p. 44, 1846). 



M. E. Meyrat, of Birsfelden, has obtained from the Upper Lias of 

 the neighbourhood of Ohmden in Wiirttemberg (the same bed that 

 furnished Jager's specimen) a fine perfect skeleton of Ichthyosaunts 

 avirostris, within the ribs of which there is a smaller skeleton appa- 

 rently of the same species ; but in this case the head of the small 

 specimen is turned towards the front of the larger one. Professor 

 Merian thinks that this position of so large an individual is hardly com- 



