CARBONIFEROUS LABYRINTHODONT 559 
obligingly consented to this proposition, and the specimen reached 
me in perfect safety on the 27th of November, my interest in it 
having in the meanwhile been greatly heightened by the reports 
respecting its characters which had reached me from Professor 
Rogers, Mr. David Page, and Mr. Armstrong of Glasgow. 
A glance at the fossil was sufficient to satisfy me that these reports 
had not unduly exaggerated its merits. It exhibited, in fact, the 
greater part of the contour of a skull, 15 inches long by 12 inches 
wide at the widest part. That the under or palatine surface of the 
skull was turned towards the eye was obvious from the numerous 
stumps of broken teeth which followed the anterior moiety of its 
contour ; but almost the whole of this surface was obscured by a thick 
coat of the matrix, in which were partially imbedded many of the 
long and pointed crowns of the teeth. These had been broken off, 
and lay not very distant from their stumps, with their points all 
directed inwards, towards the middle line of the palate. Their 
arrangement was just such as might have been expected if the axes 
of the teeth had naturally been turned somewhat inwards, and the 
vertical crush of the jsuperincumbent strata, after the fossilization 
of the skull, had consequently caused them all to fall inwards as they 
broke. The same pressure has produced a slight asymmetry of the 
whole skull. 
From the proportional size and structural features of the teeth, and 
from the general contour of the skulJ, I concluded this to be a new 
genus of Labyrinthodonts ; but in order to make sure of the point, I 
proceeded to develop the fossil, from the hard matrix in which it was 
imbedded, with much care; removing some of the teeth and, on one 
side, even a portion of the bony palate, in order to obtain a view of 
those parts, such as the orbits and posterior nares, which would enable 
me to decide the question. 
The skull, as it now appears (fig. 1), presents almost the whole of 
its palatine or inferior surface to view, with the exception of the right 
temporal region. Its greatest length, measured along a median line 
drawn from the middle of the premaxillary region to a level with the 
posterior and external points of its prolonged and broad temporal 
prolongations, is 15 inches. Its greatest width, obtained by doubling 
the distance from the left posterior and outer margin to the middle 
line, is 12 inches. Opposite the great vomerine tusks (d), the skull 
measures 5°3 inches in width. It diminishes slightly from this point 
to the rounded snout, and gradually increases in breadth posteriorly 
to the level of the supratemporal foramina (c), where it measures 
about Io inches in width. Beyond this point it widens suddenly by 
