544 MR. O. THOMAS ON LAGORCHESTES FAscraTus. [ Dec. 7, 
7. On the Wallaby commonly known as Lagorchestes 
fasciatus. By Otprietrp Tomas, Natural History 
Museum. 
[Received November 3, 1886.] 
(Plate LIX.) 
One of the earliest known of all the Australian Marsupials was 
the beautiful little banded Wallaby which was discovered in 1804 
on the islands in Shark’s Bay, Western Australia, by Péron and 
Lesueur, during their famous voyage round the world, and described 
by them in 1807 under the name of “ Kangurus fusciatus’’’. 
This species was included by all the earlier writers, with the rest 
of the Macropodida, in the single genus then recognized, whether 
called Kangurus, Macropus, or Halmaturus. In 1842, however, it 
was placed by Gould, on the authority of the typical specimens in 
the Paris Museum, in Gray’s genus Bettongia, although in the same 
year he described two other specimens of it as ‘‘ Lagorchestes 
albipilis,” thus referring them to the genus made by him just pre- 
viously for the true Hare-wallabies, of which Lagorchestes leporoides 
is the type. 
Gould’s two mistakes in referring Péron and Lesueur’s species to 
the Hypsiprymnine genus Beétongia, and in separating ‘‘ L. albipilis” 
from it, were corrected by Waterhouse in his excellent general work 
on the Marsupials, where the species was described * under the name 
of Macropus (Lagorchestes) fasciatus*—an identification accepted 
by Gould in his ‘Mammals of Australia,’ where the species is 
figured as Lagorchestes fasciatus, by which name it has since been 
generally known. 
The teeth, as well as the external characters, of L. fasciatus were 
described and figured by Waterhouse, and their differences from 
those of the true Hare-wallabies noted; but he does not seem to 
have at all appreciated the importance of these differences, which 
appear to me to be so great as to compel me, 80 years after the first 
description of the species, to form a new and special genus for its 
reception. -This genus I propose to call Lagostrophus*. 
The differences in dentition between Lagorchestes and Lagostro- 
phus are not of the trivial and unimportant nature of those charac- 
teristic of most of the other genera of this very homogeneous family, 
but are of a kind to show that Lagostrophus fasciatus must have 
not only different food, but even a different manner of eating it to 
any of the other members of the subfamily Macropodine. 
On examining the incisors of any of the ordinary Kangaroos and 
Wallabies (Plate LIX. figs. 8, 9, and 12), we find that the whole set 
form a widely open curve, and that the sizes and proportions of the 
1 Voy. Terres Austr. i. p. 114, Atl. pl. xxvii. 
2 Vol. i. p. 87 (1846). 
3 Nat. Hist. Mamm. i. p. 87 (1846). 
4 Nays, a Hare, and orpogos, a band or belt. 
