252 Letters, Announcements, &c. 
“ Referring to the fossil Giraffe, Dr. Falconer observes 
that the ‘ teeth come so near those of the existing African 
species in size and form as to be undistinguishable’*. 
“<< And with regard to the existing African mammalia, Mr. 
Wallace, commenting upon the former junction of Africa 
with Asia, says that ‘all over Africa, but more especially in 
the east, we have abundance of large ungulates and felines, 
antelopes, giraffes, buffaloes, elephants, and rhinoceroses, with 
lions, leopards, and hyzenas, of types all now or recently found 
in India’+. He elsewhere observes that the migration was 
‘apparently effected by the way of Syria and the shores of 
the Red Sea,’ and that ‘by this route the old south Pale- 
arctic fauna, indicated by the fossils of Pikermi (Greece) 
and Siwalik Hills, poured into Africa’ (p. 288).” 
In a recent part of the ‘ Records of the Geological Survey 
of India,’ Mr. Lydekker has described some bones from the 
same deposit in the Siwaliks, now in the Calcutta Museum, 
which he refers to the genus Dromeust. If Mr. Lydekker’s 
views are correct, it is certainly a most remarkable fact, as 
Mr. Davies points out, that these two forms of Struthious 
birds now so widely separated should have once coexisted in 
the same district. , 
Besides this, Mr. Davies, in the article above referred to, 
describes and figures an “entire second phalanx of the middle 
toe of a tridactyle Struthious bird, distinct from the Emu 
and the Cassowary, though approaching nearer to the latter 
than the former, from the same formation. It would there- 
fore appear that three forms of Struthioid birds were contem- 
poraneous in the ancient plains of India. 
Conothraupis, « new Genus of Tanagers.—I have been 
kindly permitted to acquire in exchange from the Warsaw 
Museum a skin of Schistochlamys speculigera, Gould (P. Z. 8S. 
* Paleontological Memoirs, vol. 1. p. 26. 
+ ‘Geographical Distribution of Animals,’ vol. i. p. 286. 
t “Notes on some Siwalik Birds,” by R. Lydekker, B.A., Geological 
Survey of India, ‘Records of the Geological Survey of India,” vol. xii, 
p- 52. 
