ON THE EXTINCT ANIMALS OF NORTH AMERICA. 
297 
tapir. With Hyrcix or the Toxoclontia they appear to have no 
near affinities.” 
The second recently announced discovery to which I alluded 
is, that a considerable number of fragments of teeth, jaws, and 
bones from the American Eocenes, the nature of which for some 
time was an exceedingly difficult problem, really belong to a low 
form of the great and important order Primates , an order em- 
bracing the lemurs, various species of monkeys, and culminating 
in man himself, and which hitherto has not been known wim 
any certainty (except at least by some equally recent discoveries 
in France) to have existed in the Eocene period. The evidence, 
however, on which this announcement, made almost simulta- 
neously by Professors Marsh and Cope, rests, is not very fully 
before the world. Already more than fifteen genera have been 
named and described, which are assigned to this group, and 
their characters are said to be those of a low or generalised 
form of lemur ; while some are compared with the true mon- 
keys. Far more rigid comparisons and carefully balanced 
deductions are required before we can assign their various 
species to their correct position, and appreciate their bearings 
upon the generic history of the Primates. In some of the 
descriptions at present before us lemur and monkey are used as 
convertible terms, and yet those who have studied these groups 
most closely are far from being able to pronounce upon the true 
relationship even of the existing species, and some even doubt 
whether they ought properly to be associated in the same order. 
But this is far too large a subject to discuss in all its bearings 
at the close of a discourse. I can only indicate it as one which 
may have much light thrown upon it by the researches of 
American palaeontologists. 
I can say nothing now of what is being done by the same 
persons, in the same regions of the world, with regard to other 
classes of animals than the one I have hitherto been speaking 
of. But the great and important discoveries of new forms and 
new links between old forms have not been confined to the 
mammalia alone. The knowledge of the past history of birds, 
reptiles, and of fishes, has likewise been greatly enlarged. The 
very remarkable discovery of Odontornithes, or birds with true 
teeth and other reptilian characters, has been made. Numbers 
of new invertebrates, and a whole world of new fossil plants, 
have been brought to light. 
Apart from the special interest of the individual results, some 
few only of which I have been able to bring under notice on 
this occasion, the contemplation of what has been done in 
American palaeontology in the last few years teaches us — First, 
that the living world around us at the present moment bears 
but an exceedingly small proportion to the whole series of 
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