GILPIN OBSERVATIONS OX SOME FOSSIL BONES. 403 



plete, with the head large, the shaft short and thick, and the muscular 

 marks and processes very bold. It has two articulating surfaces at 

 the lower end for the ulna and radius. Its length was four and one- 

 half inches, and breadth at the head two and one-half. A very 

 perfect radius, broad and fiat, with a convex anterior, concave pos- 

 terior edge, and two articulating surfaces at its lower extremity, 

 length four inches, breadth one inch and a half, — a fragment barely 

 enough to show it to have been an ulna, its olecranon gone, and 

 one small phalanx completed the bones of the upper extremity. 

 Of the very numerous fragments of ribs, but two or three remain 

 so entire as to show their original shape. Their articulating sur- 

 faces both vertebral and sternal are large, an appearance of neck 

 longer or shorter is in all, and whilst one of the shortest or sternal 

 measures nine inches, the largest or abdominal with a very flattened 

 extremity measures two feet. 



From comparing these bones with recent specimens of Ceta2 

 both Delphinus and Phocenas, in the Halifax Museum, and with 

 the excellent plates of B. Musculus, by Dr. Dwight, Boston 

 Natural Plistory Society, there can be no doubt that they are the 

 remains of a small Cetacean. The fragment of the lower jaw so 

 exactly resembles the cut in Dana's Geology of Beluga Yermontana, 

 as to hazard the conjecture that they are closely allied, if not 

 identical, wdth its remains found also in the same deposit but many 

 miles distant. We also notice the want of parallelism between the 

 line of spinal cord, and that of the diapophises, which is shared 

 also by a recent skeleton of a Delphinus in Halifax Museum, — the 

 process projecting forward from the root of the spinous process, 

 which also obtains in the recent Delphinus where it anchyloses with 

 the preceding spinous process — the peculiar articulation of the 

 chevrons and the want of spinal ridge in the scapula, this ridge 

 first appearing in the Dudongs or herbivorous Cetae, which, 8ino:u- 

 larly enough, has pectoral mammae instead of abdominal, and in 

 suckling clasps its young to its bosom. 



Of the age of these bones as they were found in the Champlain 

 clay deposit, or that period when the river terraces were formed,, 

 we may infer that he had lived and died in some ancient ocean, 

 from which the present ocean level has receded, or its bed hag' 

 6 



