Dr. C. I. Forsijfh Major — Characters of Mammals. 243 



is the only one known of this genus, although various large-sized 

 Giraffoid hornless skulls have in turn been called JTelladotheriiini , 

 and even united with the Pikermian species. For the present it 

 cannot be decided whether the ITelladotheniim was hornless in both 

 sexes or in the female only. The Giraffoid genus from the 

 contemporai'y deposit of Samos — which occurs also at Maragha in 

 Persia — has been founded by me on a form provided with supraorbital 

 horns and on a hornless form, which otherwise agrees perfectly 

 with the former; I therefore have considered them to be male and 

 female forms respectively of one species, Samotherium Boissieri, Maj. 

 A smaller, closely allied form, Palceotragus Bouenti, Gaudr. (Pikermi, 

 Samos, Maragha), originally believed to be an antelope, is also 

 represented by a form provided with, and one devoid of, horns. 



" In the skull of an aged specimen of Samotherium, just above 

 the orbits, where the large horns are placed in the horned specimens, 

 there occur very small processes separated by a suture from the 

 underlying part of the frontal." ^ The explanation I then submitted 

 was, that in aged individuals of the female Samotherium male 

 characters occasionally make their appearance. Another specimen,- 

 of which but a portion of the frontal is preserved, exhibits above 

 the right orbit only a similar epiphysis as the one just mentioned ; 

 its height is no more than 9 mm., with a longitudinal extension 

 of about 32 mm. To judge from the size of the fragment and the 

 texture of the bone, it belonged to an adult, although not an aged 

 individual. It cannot therefore be considered to be a young 

 specimen of the horned form ; in the latter the horn attains a size 

 of upwards of 210 mm.^ Several other adult hornless skulls of 

 Samotherium, one of which is in the British Museum, show no 

 trace of an incipient horn. 



From the foregoing we may conclude that in this Tertiary member 

 of the Giraffid^e the females are beginning to develop horns, which 

 primarily were male sexual characters of the Samotherium, whether 

 used as weapons or purely ornamental. 



Bovincs. — With regard to all their salient characters the Bovina) 

 are the most terminal group of Ruminants. No instance of the 

 occurrence of hornless females in recent wild bovine animals is known. 



When working in the Palseontological Museum at Florence I came 

 upon the hornless skull of a Ruminant from the Pliocene of the 

 Val d'Arno, which had been discovered a few yeai's previously and 

 variously interpreted ; the statement published somewhere that in 

 the Val d'Arno fauna occurred a Ruminant closely allied to the 

 camel, refers to the skull in question. On close examination I found 

 that the fossil presented all the cranial and dental characters of 

 Falconer's Bos etrnscus from the same deposits, with the essential 

 difierence that no traces of horn-cores were present. My conclusion 

 was that the skull was that of a female ' Bos etruscus.^ I published 



1 Forsyth Major, op. cit., p. 319. 



^ Nos. 712, 712« of my first collection from Samos, which is the property of 

 Mr. William Barbey in Geneva. 



2 No. 17 of the Swiss Collection. 



