ot 
Governor of the Cape of Good Hope, Sir Henry Barkley, 
K.C.B., has reached me of the bony structure of the fore- 
paw, which again shows an advance towards the mamma- 
lian type. The pollex has two phalanges ; the four other 
digits have each three phalanges. The slight difference in 
length in these fingers is due, as in a dog’s paw, to difference 
of length in such phalanges, not to difference of number 
of these, not to excess in the third and fourth digits beyond 
the number three, which number rules in the fingers of all 
terrestrial mammals. 
“Reverting to the chief character of the Theriodont rep- 
tiles, a fact of some significance may be noted, viz., that the 
incisive formula of some of the species is repeated in the 
low marsupial order of mammals. 
Didelphis, e.g., has as in Cynodraco;'^ Thylacinus 
and Sarcophilus have i.^, as in Cynochampsa.* 
In no pacental carnivore do the incisors exceed |e|. 
Thus in South Africa there lived in lower Mesozoic or 
Permian times a group of fossil reptiles possessed of characters 
now exclusively mammalian. In a subsequent communica- 
tion [opat. xxxii, p. 352], Professor Owen establishes 
further that they lived also in the Permian (?) age in the 
region of the Urals. He also believed that they occur in 
the Permian rocks of Prince Edward’s Island ; but the 
specimens on which that conclusion is based seems to me 
open to another interpretation. 
4. Prof. Marsh on a New Order of Birds. 
The labours of Professor Marsh of Yale, whose enterprise 
has revealed a whole mammalian fauna in the Tertiaries 
of the Far West, on the birds of the Cretaceous rocks of 
the region of the Rocky Mountains and of the Atlantic coast 
[American Journal of Science aud Art, x. Nov. 1875] have 
added to our knowledge a new group of Birds constituting 
* Two new fossil reptilian genera. 
