1889.] Results of a Mission to South Africa, II 



saurus. I have here something to represent at least one of these 

 mammalian characters, and although these are new and I can there- 

 fore give you no name for them, they served afterwards to aid us very 

 materially in our investigations ; because, as we got on and bad the 

 pleasure of seeing specimens collected by Dr. Kannemeyer, (who has 

 been a liberal contributor to the Cape Town Museum,) we found tha the 

 too was upon the zone in which these mammal-like reptiles occur, 

 and then, when we went further south still to Queen's Town, there 

 we found exactly the same forms as those which occur at 

 Aliwal. We were told they came from Lady Frere, and accordingly 

 the horses were put in, and away we went to Lady Frere, because we 

 were told that these things occurred just below the Indwe coal-field. 

 Now this is a point which would suggest that coal should be looked 

 for in the country between Queen's Town and the Orange River, and 

 it meant that if by this means we had come upon the beds of the 

 Indwe coal, we may very well look for the northern extension of that 

 coal, for the beds of coal in which we found these mammal-like 

 animals — and here I say that if science is able to furnish a grammar so 

 to speak by means of fossils in this way, it only needs the organis- 

 ation of these laws to prevent the waste of money by fruitless search 

 for the treasures w.iich the earth contains, and obtain at the least 

 possible cost the wealth with which the earth teems, to those who 

 seek those precious results. 



Now having sought thus for the history of the gradations of 

 life as they were distributed, and found that iriseeking the 

 history of life we came upon matters of practical importance 

 in the way of coal, it became desirable to gather up, some- 

 what more fully than we had done hitherto, the story of the structure 

 of the animals which had came to our hands ; and when we took the 

 skulls of these wonderful animals which Dr. Kannemeyer had collected 

 and we found subsequently that he had presented to the Albany 

 Museum at Graham's Town, we found also that, reptiles though they 

 may be, they had lost all the distinctive characteristics in the skull of 

 the reptilian, with one or two possible exceptions that we could not 

 examine into, and had acquired in other cases the character of the 

 skull of the mammalia. Even in the form of a crocodile's skull were 

 those typical characters of the mammalian skull seen, which dis- 

 tinguish it from other types by the way in which the lower jawbone 

 is united to the wall of the brain case by the squumosal bone. We 

 know that in between the squamosal bone and the lower jaw there is 

 a large bone called the- quadrate bone, occupying an intervening 

 position. In birds you find there is a bone of this kind, which fits into 

 a cavity at the side of the skull, behind the eye, which acts perfectly 

 freely, and which gives attachment to the lower jaw. In the reptile 



