494 On the Great Rorqual of the Indian Ocean. [No. 5. 



Further information respecting the * Susu' of the Indus and its 

 tributaries is very desirable.* 



Of the Syrenia, or Gravigrada of de Blainville, the Cetacea Her- 

 bivora of the Cuviers (which Professors de Blainville and Owen have 

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

 drupedal Pachydermsf), we have only the genus Haltcoee or 

 Duyong. The skull and the lumbar and caudal portion of the vertebral 

 column of an adult, 1 made out long ago to pertain to H. attstra- 

 lis, Owen, the Australian Duyong as distinguished from that of the 

 Indian seas, or H. indicus, F. Cuvier : but how we came by an 

 Australian specimen was an enigma only very recently solved. In 

 Oorbyn's India Review, III, 46 (1838), 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 individuals were picked up by Dr. Tytler 

 at Raffles Bay, on the north coast of New Holland. In one in- 

 stance 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, obvi- 

 ously, our bones of Halicoee austealis.]: I am not aware that it 

 is yet generally known to zoologists that the H. attstealis differs 



* The existence of the Sum of the Indus, as a particular species, is referred to 

 in Prof. Keinhardt's admirable paper on the Gangetic species, a translation of 

 which (by the late Dr. Wallich) appears in the Ann. Mag. N. H. for 1852, pp. 162, 

 279, and vide p. 291. An excellent figure of the animal accompanies that paper. 



t Vide Troc. Zool. Soc. 1838, p. 45, &c. 



% 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 corvettes ' Geographic,' ' Naturaliste,' and goelette ' Casuarina' (1800-4), 

 — " edited by M. Francis Peron, naturalist to the expedition," and published in 

 1807. Dampier mistook 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. 



