BALJENODOX PHYSALOIDES. 541 



the embryos of existing Ruminants feebly and evanescently 

 manifest in the dark womb, by their upper incisors, their 

 divided cannon bones, and hornless foreheads, the mature 

 and persistent characters of their ancient predecessors the 

 Anoplotheria, so may the equally ancient Whales of the 

 eocene seas have retained and fully developed those max- 

 illary teeth which are transitory and functionless in the 

 existing species. 



On this supposition of the relation of the above-de- 

 scribed fossil teeth to the tympanic bones in the Crag at 

 Felixstow, the proportions in which they are there found 

 would indicate that the teeth were less numerous in the ex- 

 tinct Cetaceans, from which they have been derived, than 

 they are in the Cachalot. The recent Ziphius of the Se- 

 chelle Islands has but a single tooth on each side of the 

 lower jaw when full-grown, like the great Delphinus bidens 

 of our own seas. But the light of these analogies can give 

 but a dim and distant view of the actual generic characters 

 of creatures, whose former existence is revealed to us by 

 a few fragments of their fossilized skeletons, which have 

 been bruised and worn by ages of elemental turmoil. It 

 may be surprising to many, but not more surprising than 

 gratifying, that the means of investigation at present at 

 our command enable us satisfactorily to determine from 

 such fragments, not only the kingdom of Nature, but the 

 class and the order to which they belonged. They fur- 

 ther prove that those ancient Mammals of the deep 

 appertained to the carnivorous section of Cetacea in the 

 Cuvierian system. And if, as is probable, the Whales' 

 form of ear-bone and the Cachalot's character of tooth 

 were combined in the same individual, a distinct family 

 of Carnivorous Cetacea must be established for the eocene 

 fossils, which would form an interesting transitional link 



