OF THE ORNITHORHYNCHUS PARADOXUS. 
519 
The opinion of Sir Everard Home was soon after adopted by Professor 
Geoffroy St. Hilaire, who, in the Bulletin de la Societe Philomathique, 
tom. iii. p. 225, constituted a new order for these animals under the term 
“ Monotremes,” being induced to believe, from an imperfect dissection, 
that the genital products of both sexes, as well as the urine and excrement, 
were voided by a common outlet*. Concluding also by inference that the 
mammary glands as well as nipples were wanting, and strengthened in his 
belief of the oviparous nature of the Monotremata, by some accounts from 
New South Wales of the discovery of the eggs of the Ornitborhynchus'f-, he 
subsequently separated the monotrematous animals altogether from the Mam- 
malia, and characterized them as a class intermediate to Quadrupeds and 
Birds. (Bulletin de la Societe Philomathique, tom. viii. p. 95. — Annales des 
Sciences Nat. xviii. p. 164.) The same idea had previously been entertained 
by Lamarck, (Phiiosophie ^nalomique, 8vo, tom. i. pp. 145, 342); and by 
Van der Hceven, (Nova Acta Physico-medica Acad. Nat. Cur. tom. xi. Part. II. 
p. 36S). But with these naturalists also the proposed dismemberment was 
founded principally on the presumed absence of mammary organs, unsup- 
ported by any additional facts relative to the internal anatomy of the species 
in question. 
This mode of viewing the Monotremata was not, therefore, generally 
assented to. Possessing so many peculiarities of structure, these animals 
could not fail of attracting due attention from the immortal Cuvier. With 
his usual sagacity, he had very early perceived the true nature of the rela- 
tion in which the Myrmecophaga aculeata of Shaw stood to the genus it was 
then placed in, and accordingly in the “ Tableau Elementaire de l’Histoire 
Naturelle,” (1797,) he separated it from the true ant-eaters, under the deno- 
mination of Echidna. He subsequently made considerable additions to the 
anatomical history of this species as well as to that of the Ornithorhynchus, 
acknowledged their mutual relations, and adopted the collective term pro- 
* See on tlie contrary the description of the male organs of the Ornithorhynchus, by Dr. Knox, in 
the fifth volume of the Wernerian Transactions, p. 152, where Sir Everard Home’s account of the 
passage of the seminal fluid by a distinct channel through the penis is confirmed. 
f See Mr. Hill’s Letter in the thirteenth volume of the Linnean Transactions, inserted in the 
M6m. du Museum, tom. xv. p. 622 : and that of Professor Grant in the eighteenth volume of the 
Annales des Sciences Naturelles, p. 161, 
3x2 
