Cetacea. 7129 



Of the Syrenia, or Gravigrada of De Blainville, the Cetacea hevbi- 

 voraofthe Cuviers (which Professors De Blainville and Owen have 

 shown most satisfactorily to be much more nearly akin to the quadru- 

 pedal Pachyderms*), w^e have only the genus Halicore or dnyong. 

 The skjill and the lumbar and caudal portion of the vertebral column 

 of an adult I made out long ago to pertain to H. australis of Owen, 

 the Australian duyong as distinguished from that of the Indian Seas, 

 or H. indicus of F. Cuvier ; but how we came by an Australian speci- 

 men was an enigma only very recently solved. In Corbyn's * India 

 Review,' vol. iii. p. 46, there is a memoir of the late Dr. Robert Tytler, 

 of the Bengal Medical Establishment ; and in this memoir we read 

 that " During his various expeditions Dr. Tytler made some valuable 

 collections of natural curiosities, of which he largely and liberally 

 contributed to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta. In 1827 he read a 

 paper on the duyong or dayoung. The bones of four different indi- 

 viduals were picked up by Dr. Tytler at RafSes Bay, on the north 

 coast of New Holland. In one instance they were sufficiently numerous 

 to form nearly an entire skeleton of the animal. This creature is not 

 uncommon in the Eastern Archipelago, but its existence on the coast 

 of New Holland was made known for the first time by Dr. Tytler." 

 Hence, obviously, our bones of Halicore australis. 



The existence of a duyong on the Australian coast was recognised 

 so long ago as by Peron, in his account of the ' Voyage of Discovery 

 to Australia,' made by the coi*vettes " Geographic," " Naturaliste," and 

 goelette " Casuarina," in 1800 — 4, edited by M. Francis Peron, 

 naturalist to the expedition, and published in 1807. Dampier mis- 

 took them for hippopotami ; but he only saw a head, "half decomposed 

 by digestion," and the tusks doubtless helped to mislead him, for little 

 in his time was known of hippopotami beyond their tusks, our accurate 

 acquaintance with this animal being still quite recent. 



Peron only saw a few teeth ; but he mentions one of these animals 

 which " lay extended on the beach of '20 to 22 decimetres [Q^ to 7 feet 

 English] in length, already half-decomposed by putrefaction, and which 

 appeared to our sailors," he adds, " so different from the Phocae that 

 they thought they ought to bring its remains to me. Unable to bring 

 the entire head, on account of the extreme stench which it exhaled, 



(by the late Dr. Wallich) appears in the • Annals and Magazine of Natural History ' 

 for 1852, pp. 162, 279, and vide p. 291. An excellent figure of the animal accompanies 

 that pa|)er. 



* Vide ' Proceedings of ihe Zoological Society ' for 1838, p. 45, &c. 



XVIII. 2 X 



