OF THE RED CRAG. 



page above cited, he will be p\izzled to understand the note purporting to afford the 

 ' unde derivatur' of the generic name under which it is there described. The truth is that, 

 having detected its nature as a tooth, and the affinity in structure to the physeteroid type 

 of Cetacean teeth, I suspected it might have belonged to one of the ziphial divisions of 

 P/ii/seterida, and named it in the first instance Ziphiodon, as the note tells, from "Ziphius, 

 generic name of a fossil Cetacean, and oSouc, a tooth." 



Subsequent acquisitions of fossil petrotympanic bones from the same deposit and 

 locality as those to which Mr. Charlesworth had traced the tooth in question, and some of 

 the larger of which ' Cetotolites' showed the more simple balaenoid type of form as con- 

 trasted with the division of the involute convexity into an outer and inner lobe, and the 

 non-continuation of the overarching wall around the inner end of the cavity, characteristic of 

 'Cachalots' and Ziphial ear-bones, induced the suspicion that the fossil tooth in question, from 

 its agreement in size with those balaenoid ear-bones, might appertain to some such species, 

 more especially as the cetotolites of the Cachalot type from the ' Red Crag' were much 

 smaller in size ; and, at the last hour of going to press, I gave this doubt its benefit ; 

 but omitted to erase from the proof-sheet the note explaining the first imposed generic 

 name. In this stage of knowledge of detached, fragmentary, and scattered fossils 

 one can only suggest a guess, nor did I assume to give more, by the light of the 

 analogies detailed in pp. 340 and 341, than "a dim and distant view of the actual 

 generic characters of creatures revealed to us by a few fragments of their fossilized skele- 

 tons, which have been bruised and worn by ages of elemental turmoil.''^ 



Unremitted attention to the Mammalian fossils of the Red Crag has failed, hitherto 

 (1868), to add to the grounds for determining the generic nature of the tooth referred by 

 me, in 1840, to a Ziphiodon, and subsequently, in 1846, to a Balanodon. 



It is affirmed by E. Ray Lankester, Esq., in a paper on Crag Mammalia, in 'Quart. 

 Journal Geological Society' for February 8th, 1865 (p. 231), on the authority of 

 M. Van Beneden, " that the Balsenodon teeth of the first form (that originally described) 

 are, without doubt, the teeth of the bident lower jaws of those Ziphioids whose remains 

 occur with them in the Red Crag." 



The reception of the evidence, when the experienced Cetologist of Louvain may have 

 the leisure to publish it, proving beyond doubt that the tooth in question belongs to a 

 Zipliius of the Red Crag, will be most acceptable. In the meanwhile, however, I cannot 

 help resting in the same state of uncertainty, oscillating, as it were, between ZipJiiodon ' 

 and Balanodon, as from the years 1840 to 1868. And I have the greater difficulty in 

 extricating myself from this expectant state of mind, because of the number of distinct 

 species of Ziphii which, in that interval of time, I have been able, I trust, to define to 

 the satisfaction of pala30cetologists. When M. Van Beneden's demonstrations reach us, 

 we shall know to which of the species (or Grayan genera) of British Red Crag Ziphials 

 the tooth of Balanodon belongs. 



1 Op. cit., p. 541. 



