Miscellaneous. 



157 



Col. Sykes from the depth of eighteen feet in a cave, at the mouth 

 of which he shot both the male and female hyaena that inhabited it, 

 and descending its interior ran his head against a putrid portion 

 of an ass which stuck across and obstructed the passage. 



Mr. Austen is disposed to substitute the agency of lions for that 

 of hyaenas in the work of collecting the bones that are so abundant, 

 in the caves of Devonshire, and correctly states that the bones of 

 lions, or a large Felis, larger than a lion, have been found in nearly all 

 the ossiferous caverns. Now in all the caves of which I have any 

 experience, the remains of lions are very rare in comparison with the 

 number of hyaenas' bones in the same cavern ; and without denying 

 to these few lions their lion's share in the work of killing their prey 

 and eating the flesh, I must claim the bones as the perquisite of their 

 more ossifragous brethren, and demand justice to the hyaenas, as 

 the chief, I do not say the exclusive, agents in dragging them to 

 their dens. 



The proportion of teeth in the cave of Kirkdale indicated one 

 lion to nearly 100 hyaenas. 



REPTILES. 



Professor Owen, in a recent paper on the teeth of the Labyrintho- 

 don (Mastodonsaurus of Jaeger), a genus common to the keuper 

 of Germany and to the lower sandstone of Warwick and Leaming- 

 ton, has added another example to the many before produced by 

 him, of the immense importance of microscopic odontology in geo- 

 logical investigations. 



Two years have scarcely elapsed, since, by the application of this 

 infallible test, he at once transferred the supposed reptile Basilo- 

 saurus of Virginia to a genus allied to the Dugongs in the class of 

 Mammals ; and as if in recompense for this abduction from the fa- 

 mily of Reptiles, he has now, by the same microscopic test, removed 

 even the supposed approximation in the form of the teeth of the 

 Mastodonsaurus to that of a Mammal, and shown it to be nearer 

 that of Ichthyosaurus than of any other animal. Professor Jaeger 

 had already shown, by the basilar bones of the head, that his Masto- 

 donsaurus was a huge Batrachian reptile allied to the Salamanders, 

 and its teeth, not yet submitted to microscopic examination of their 

 transverse section, presented no apparent peculiarity of internal 

 structure ; it was reserved for the microscope of Owen to discover 

 within this tooth a condition of cerebriform convolutions or laby- 

 rinthoid gyrations, hitherto unknown in the entire animal kingdom ; 

 and on this just ground he substitutes the characteristic name La- 

 byrinthodon for that of Mastodonsaurus, which implied affinities 

 that have no existence. 



The fang of the tooth of the Ichthyosaurus offers the only known 

 approximation to the plan of that of the Labyrinthodon, but on a 

 more simple scale, and had been hitherto considered the most com- 

 plex condition of dental structure in the family of Reptiles ; in both 

 these animals the external layer of cement is inflected inwards to a 

 certain distance from the circumference towards the centre in 

 straight and vertical folds at pretty regular intervals, which are oc- 

 cupied by dentine radiating from the interior of the tooth ; but in 



