270 General Notes. [ March, 
nary notice: “ An American Silurian Scorpion,” under the name 
_ of Paleophonus osborni. The animal is no doubt a real scorpion, 
and not an Eurypterid; but as a few of the characteristics ascribed 
to it by the author would seem to remove it very far from other 
scorpions and especially from the Palzophonoide, to which it 
appears to me to be closely related, I venture to offer a few obser- 
vations on this arachnid, or rather, on Mr.Whitfield’s interpretation 
of certain points in its organization. Of course I give no other 
weight than that of mere suppositions to the opinions I am going 
to express, being fully aware of the difficulty and perhaps 
rashness of offering criticisms on the description of a rather 
badly preserved fossil, without knowing the “ corpus delicti” from 
actual inspection. 
According to Mr. Whitfield, the abdomen (preabdomen) of his 
scorpion is provided with sx long and broad ventral plates, and if 
this were true, this animal would of course be so different from 
the body in front of the plate in question. But to me it does not 
seem necessafy to admit that Proscorpius differs in so high a 
degree from other. known scorpions. I strongly suspect, that all 
that is seen of the abdomen in Mr. Whitfield’s specimen (with the 
exception only of the narrow border to the left, and, perhaps the 
posterior part of the equally narrow right-hand border) is formed 
exclusively of the dorsal plates. The whole upper side of the 
abdomen is broken or cracked longitudinally; the narrower, 
right-hand part, considered by Mr. Whitfield to be formed of the 
inside of the ventral plates, has perhaps an appearance different 
from that of the rest of the upper surface, only from having been 
more strongly depressed and crushed, and the apparently slightly 
greater lengths (in the antero-posterior direction) of the right 
hand parts of the plates would seem to depend on the same cause. 
This interpretation easily accounts for the circumstance that in 
Mr. Whitfield’s specimen the articulations between ad the “ven- 
tral g plates (not only between the posterior ones) are direct con- 
tinuations of the articulations between the “ dorsal ” plates, which 
is not the case in other, at least not in recent, scorpions, In these, 
in fact, the articulations between the first two or three dorsal 
plates do not correspond to or are continued by articulations Oñ 
1 In Science, Vol. vir, p. 87 (July 31, 1885). 
sister catia alana amma 
