AMPHITHERIUM. 37 



and experienced Physiologist and Comparative Anato- 

 mist. 



The following dissentient opinions have, however, subse- 

 quently been recorded, and ought here to be noticed. Mr. 

 Ogilby, the learned Secretary of the Zoological Society, in 

 a paper read before the Geological Society, at the con- 

 clusion of my second memoir, after calling attention to the 

 relative extent and position of the incisive and canine teeth 

 in the fossil jaws, as objections, " because, among all 

 Mammals, the incisors occupy the front of the jaw, and 

 stand at right angles to the line of the molars," stated 

 " After a due consideration of the whole of the evidence, 

 that the fossils present so many important and distinctive 

 characters in common with Mammals on the one hand, 

 and cold-blooded animals on the other, that he does not 

 think Naturalists are justified, at present, in pronouncing 

 definitively to which Class the fossils really belong. 11 * 



Thus the question, in the opinion of the Naturalist just 

 cited, appeared not to have been advanced beyond the 

 doubts of M. de Blainville, which had led to the examina- 

 tions and conclusions dissented from. Professor Grant has 

 recorded a more decided opinion on the mooted question, in 

 his " General View of the Characters and the Distribution 

 of extinct animals," published in Thompson's British Annual 

 for 1839. " The jaws and teeth of Amphitherium, mis- 

 taken," he says, "by some for a mammiferous Didelphis, 

 occur in the Stonesfield Oolite ; they are distinctly asso- 

 ciated with Trigonia and other marine shells, and are 

 imagined to have been detached and mutilated by drifting. 



* Proceedings of the Geological Society, Dec. 1838, Mr. Ogilby has lately 

 informed me that his opinion, with regard to the non-mammalian nature of the 

 Stonesfield fossils, was expressed in the above abstract more strongly than he 

 intended, but I am not aware that he afterwards corrected or published any modi- 

 fication of his views. 



