1843.] 241 



or to a skeleton of the existing girafFe : but the grounds for referring 

 the vertebra to that genus were, that it belonged to a ruminant with 

 a columnar neck, the type of the ruminants being preserved, though 

 very attenuated in its proportions : that the animal was very distinct 

 from any of the camel tribe : that it was in the girafFe that there 

 existed such a form most aberrant from the mean in respect of its 

 great elongation. That the bone belonged to a girafFe was put forth 

 at the time as only a probable inference, and chiefly to serve as an 

 index to future inquiries. 



The authors, having since the former period obtained additional 

 specimens, and had access to the fullest means of comparison, are 

 now able to place on the record of determined Sewalik fossils, one 

 very marked species of giraflre, and also indications of a second species, 

 which, so far as the scanty materials go, appears to come near to that 

 of Africa. 



The first specimen to which they refer is the identical vertebra 

 noticed by Capt. Cautley in 1838. (See PL III. fig. 1-5.) It is an 

 almost perfect cervical vertebra. It were needless to enter on the 

 characters which prove it to have belonged to a ruminant. Its 

 elongated form shows that it belonged to one with a columnar neck ; 

 that is to say, either to one of the camel and x\uchenia tribe, or to 

 a giraflre, or to some distinct and unknown type. The fossil differs 

 from the vertebra of a camel, 1st, in the position of the vertebrary 

 foramina {a, a') ; 2nd, in the obsolete form of the upper transverse 

 processes. According to the masterly analysis of the Macrauchenia 

 by Professor Owen, the Camelidse and Macrauchenia differ from all 

 other known mammalia in the following peculiarity ; that the trans- 

 verse processes of the six inferior cervical vertebrae are without per- 

 forations for the vertebrary arteries, which enter the vertebrary canal 

 alono- with the spinal chord, then penetrate the superior vertebrary 

 laminse, and emerge on the canal again close under the anterior 

 oblique processes. This structure appears on the cervical vertebrae 

 of the Sewalik fossil camel. In the vertebra now under considera- 

 tion, on the contrary, the foramina {a, a') maintain their ordinary 

 position, that is, they perforate the transverse processes, and appear 

 on the surface of the body of the vertebra. 



Since the bone therefore does not belong to a camel, is it the bone 

 of a girafFe ? There is preserved in the museum of the Zoological 

 Society the skeleton of a young Nubian girafFe which died at the 

 Society's gardens. When its third cervical vertebra is placed in ap- 

 position vnth the fossil, the two are found to agree in every general 

 character, though they disagree in some of their proportions, and in 

 certain minor peculiarities. In this young and immature girafFe the 

 length of the third cervical vertebra is 7i inches ; what, then, is the 

 leno-th of this bone in the adult Nubian girafFe 1 The autliors, from 

 their not having had under their examination this vertebra of an 

 adult animal, have been unable to ascertain this point directly ; but 

 they are able to infer it, from the length of a detached bone preserved 

 in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of London, which 

 is the second cervical vertebra of a girafFe, nearly, but not quite full- 



