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Trof. H. O. Seeley — On Buhalus Bainii. 



preserved in the Albany Museum. I was informed that these heds 

 are 300 to 400 feet above the sea. The teeth shown to me in their 

 worn, polished, yellowish tone rather recalled the condition of Eed 

 Crag fossils. 



All over the interior of the Colony freshwater Tertiary deposits 

 have filled up ancient valleys, and sometimes existing rivers 

 have cut channels for short distances through these accumulations. 

 I noticed them sometimes to have been partially eroded and again 

 filled up, before modern river denudation laid the existing sections 

 bare. In these older muds and gravels are remains of a terrestrial 

 fauna which no longer lives in Africa. I had no opportunity of 

 determining its antiquity, or of making an approximate list of its 

 fossils ; but my attention was called by M. Peringuey to some of 

 these remains in the South African Museum at Cape Town, Besides 

 these newer Tertiary fossils, there are one or two which would be of 

 exceptional interest if their African origin could be established. 



Cranium of Buhalus Bainii, Seeley. 



They are evidently very ancient acquisitions, and the circumstance 

 that they are not mentioned by the elder Bain, and have no mark 

 indicating presentation, refers them to a time too remote for tradition 

 to be helpful. One is the middle portion of a mammalian skull with 

 the teeth worn down to the alveolar margin, which seems to me to 

 be the Hippopotamus sivalensis and the trustees have generously 

 entrusted me with the specimen for determination. The skull is rather 

 smaller than the Indian specimens in the British Museum, and the 

 teeth are worn down to the alveolar border, so that characteristic 

 details of dental structure are obliterated. The other specimen is 

 the distal end of the femur and proximal end of the corresponding 

 tibia of an enormous proboscidian. The extremities of these bones 

 had a circumference of about 80 centira. They are as heavily 

 mineralized as Karoo fossils with which they had become associated, 

 and though free from matrix, are so like Siwalik specimens, that it 

 is possible that they may have been brought from India. In this 

 uncertainty I may mention that I once found in a newly unpacked 

 collection of Dicynodont bones from South Africa in the British 

 Museum, an undoubted Mammalian fragment, which was rejected as 

 being a Siwalik fossil, which had accidentally dropped among the 

 other bones. Still the possibility of such a fauna being represented 

 at the Cape is of sufficient interest to justify this reference to 

 specimens without a history. 



