ORDER EDENTATA. 313 



form of the lower jaw, which separates the animal in this 

 respect from the order Edentata, and approximates it to 

 the Ruminantia and Pachydermata. 



The third tribe of the Edentata of our author is distin- 

 guished by exclusive, or anomalous characters, still more 

 strongly marked than the two former, though of a nature 

 very distinct from them in kind. This tribe includes* at 

 present, but two genera, the species of which are very dif- 

 ferent in external appearances, though they accord in all 

 those peculiarities noticed by the Baron in the text, and 

 which renders a repetition of them, as common to the tribe 

 of Monotremes, unnecessary. 



Dr. Shaw was the first naturalist who introduced these 

 singular creatures to notice, and Sir Everard Home was 

 the first physiologist and comparative anatomist who de- 

 scribed their internal structure. The systematic zoologists 

 were much puzzled in allotting them a place in their systems, 

 more especially as the questions of their parturition and 

 lactation were, in some degree, matter of doubt. M. Geof- 

 froy proposed making a distinct order of them ; Dumeril 

 placed them after the Edentata ; Tiedman appended them 

 as an addition to the class Mammalia ; Lamark pro- 

 posed a distinct class for them; Illiger associated them 

 with one of the Tortoises (Testudo Squammata Bontii), 

 and named the group Reptantia ; Blainville treated them 

 as anomalies among the Didephous animals, and would, 

 with Lamark, separate them into a class, and our author, 

 as we have seen, refers them as a third tribe, or group, to 

 the order Edentata. 



Dr. Shaw, in 1792, described in the Naturalist's Miscel- 

 lany, the Aculeated Ant-eater; but as as he had not then 

 examined the internal structure of the animal, his conclu- 

 sions drawn from superficial appearances only, that the 

 animal in question, while it had the spines of the Porcu- 



