NATURAL HISTORY MISCELLANY. 719 
Plagiaulax, although the allegation of affinity between Plagiaulax 
and Microlestes rested upon one of those “ hasty blunders” which 
detract from the safe and accurate progress of any science. Profes- 
sor Owen we believe on one occasion (‘‘ Palzeontology,” 1st edit., p. 
302 ; 2nd edit., p. 339) pointed out that some of the teeth of Plag- 
iaulax bore resemblance to some teeth in Microlestes, in a sentence 
which was plainly and lucidly expressed. The incapacity as it 
seems, to apprehend the meaning of an ordinary sentence leads 
us also to doubt the capacity of judging of the nature or degree 
of the demonstration of the affinity of Plagiaulax to Hypsiprym- 
nus which a superficial observer may believe himself to find in the 
more exact writings of Falconer or Flower. 
 Relegating, therefore, the unhappy little jaw of Plagiaulax far 
away from the sect of the “Jumpers” (Saltantia) to its proper posi- 
tion in the scale of insect or flesh feeding marsupials, associated 
with its congener, the large marsupial tiger of Australia ( Thylacoleo 
carnifex), the affinities of which as a bona fide carnivore Professor 
Owen also amply proves, we have to glance at the number of new 
forms of animal life described by Professor Owen in the present 
memoir. Eight new genera of mammalia and seventeen new spe- 
cies are described in detail, all of which afford marked points of 
distinction from anything of which the palontological student in 
his wildest day dreams could have ever realized. Nearly all of © 
these forms are unquestionably marsupial and allied to the pigmy 
“ opossums ” of Australia, differing not only from each other, but 
from anything previously. known to science. We can only won- 
der at the enormous amount of variety of ‘differentiation ” which 
appeared at so remote a period of the earth’s history, and the 
mode in which the places which nowadays in the Dorsetshire 
fields are filled by moles, hedgehogs, and shrewmice, were, at the 
time of the deposition of what is now called the ‘‘ Purbeck bed ” 
occupied by animals which, while they closely resembled in many 
of their characters the existing opossums, yet differed from them 
in retaining the more “ generalized” type, from which it is not 
merely rational but probable to believe that our forms of marsu- 
pial animals existing at the present day have sprung.— Pall Mall 
Budget. 
Former EASTWARD RANGE OF THE Burraro. — The occurrence 
of the buffalo in Virginia up to the close of the last century, can 
