PROCEEDINGS 
OF THE 
EOYAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH. 
VOL. XII. 
1882-83. 
No. 114. 
Monday, March 1883. 
The Eight Hon. LOED MONCEEIFF, President, 
in the Chair. 
The President read a communication from the Science and Art 
Department, South Kensington, London, in reference to the Inter- 
national Electrical Exhibition to he held in Vienna. 
The following Communications were read : — 
1. On the so-called Bicipital Eibs. By Professor William 
Turner. 
In this paper an anatomical peculiarity was described which is 
occasionally found both in Man and the Cetacea. It is not due to 
a bifurcation of the shaft of a single rib at its vertebral end into two 
heads, but to the fusion of what ought to have been the shafts of 
two distinct ribs into a common body, and it invariably occurs at the 
apex of the thorax. Although the author had long been familiar 
with dried specimens from the human body in the Anatomical 
Museum of the University of Edinburgh, two cases which he now 
describes were the first that he had seen in the subject itself in the 
course of nearly thirty years’ experience as a teacher of anatomy, 
and it is remarkable that they should both have occurred within a 
few months of each other. A third specimen occurred in a skeleton 
in the possession of one of his pupils, Mr Minas S. P. Aganoor. 
A specimen from a large Cetacean was also shown and described. 
It formed a part of the skeleton of a Balcenopfera, some of the bones 
of which were found in 1859, others in 1863, embedded in clay in 
VOL. XII. 
I 
