On the Species of Wombats. 269 
such skins as are now before you. The P. Angus (gray), is 
a synonym of this. The black wombat, Phascolomys niger 
of Gould is, as you see by the fine adult, male and female, 
_ and the young specimens before you, which I have lately 
had trapped at the Goulbourn river for the National Museum 
collection, of an intense black colour, not only in the adult 
of both sexes, but in the young, and on getting the skeletons 
of those stuffed specimens mounted, I nearly fell into the 
mistake of supposing that a character might be found in the 
nasal bones, distinguishing the species from the brown P. 
platyrhinus more satisfactorily than the sole external 
character of colour on which Mr. Gould relied. The first 
A B 
Nasal Bones of the four species of Wombats, reduced to half the natural 
length. 
A. Lasiorhinus. B. Tasmanian Wombat. 
C. P. platyrhinus. D. P. setosus. 
adult skull and that of the young agreed in having a small 
abruptly rounded lobe, at slightly more than one-third the 
length of the outer side of each nasal bone, but fortunately I 
had the skeleton of the third specimen prepared, and found to 
my astonishment that it quite agreed with the ordinary 
