On Two Species of Molossus inhabiting the Southern United 

 States. By William Cooper. 



Read February 20, 1837. 



The great Prussian zoologist Pallas, in his Sficilegia 

 Zoologica, Fascicle IV. p. 8, suggests the name of Molossus 

 for a South American Bat, which had been previously made 

 known by Buffon and Daubenton, giving at the same time a 

 figure of the cranium, and pointing out some peculiarities in 

 its dentary system which distinguished it from all" the other 

 then known species. Accordingly it became the Vcspcrtilio 

 molosstis of Gmelin, in whose Sy sterna it forms a distinct sec- 

 tion, characterized as already indicated by Pallas. 



M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire having undertaken a revision of the 

 great genus Vcspcrtilio, proposed in the sixth volume of the 

 Annates du Museum, the V. molossus of Pallas and Gmelin as 

 the type of a separate group, for which he adopted the name 

 of Molossus, and added several other species, all natives of 

 South America. IJliger afterwards changed the name of this 

 genus to Dysopes, which is also employed by M. Temminck 

 in preference to the original name, but as the alteration seems 

 to have been introduced without sufficient necessity, we shall 

 with Cuvier adhere to that first proposed by Pallas. 



This genus, extended so as to include the Nyctinomus of 

 Geoffroy, forms the subject of an excellent memoir in the 

 Monographies de Mammalogie of Temminck. Nyctinomus 

 was originally founded on an Egyptian Bat, and the spe- 

 cies were for a time supposed to be confined to Asia and 

 Africa, until M. Geoffroy the younger himself referred to the 

 same genus the Molossus 7iasutus of Spix, under the name of 



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