286 
PROFESSOR OWEN 
CH. iX. 
‘ Lady E. has an almost professional extent and 
power of voice, chiefly exercised in the songs of 
the last Italian school. The young ladies sing 
duets and national songs. No violoncello could 
be found in the whole cotinfy of Fermanagh ; so I 
transposed the accompaniments of two German 
duets (voice and violoncello) for the flute, and they 
have gone off very well.’ 
Before the meeting of the British Association, 
Avhich was held this year at Southampton, ‘Sir 
Roderick Murchison, who was to be President, 
wrote a letter to Owen, in which reference is 
made to a quadruped known as the ‘ fossil fox,’ 
the complete skeleton of which Murchison found 
in the previous year in the great tertiary deposits 
of Oeningen in Switzerland. 
‘ . . . The so-called “ Molasse” is as great an 
opprobricism in geology as “Grauwacke” was 
before I split it up and decimated it. 
‘ If the fox really approaches very near to the 
existing Vitlpes, that evidence, as well as the forms 
of the leaves, insects, and fishes, would seem to 
make the deposit younger than Miocene properly 
so-called. . . . 
‘P.S. — In my discourse at Southampton I 
intend to dwell as much as possible (seeing that all 
former Presidents have without exception blinked 
it) on the Natural History proper discussed by the 
Association, and in this estimate the researches 
