28 Sir Everard Home on the fossil bones of an animal whose 
beiieved that the natural appearance of the orifice had been 
entirely destroyed. I have, since that time, through the 
favour of Mr. Delabeche, of Lime, received a very ac- 
curate drawing of a fossil skull of this animal, in his pos- 
session, in which the apertures of the nostrils are very distinct ; 
and he informs me that in all the skulls he has seen, the 
orifices are of the same size, and similar to that engraved in 
my first paper ; so that there now can be no doubt respecting 
the real shape and size of the aperture which corresponds to 
that in birds; and as in birds there is no bony septum narium, 
the bony plates of the opposite eye being so distinctly seen 
behind the aperture, is readily understood. 
To find any analogy between the bones of animals now 
alive, and those of animals so, long extinct, that they must be 
considered to belong to another order of beings, is matter of 
no small curiosity ; but to have discovered an analogy 
between the peculiarities met with in the bones of the animals 
of New Holland, by which they are so remarkably distin- 
guished from all others that now inhabit our globe, and 
those of bones in a fossil state, not only creates a consider- 
able degree of surprise, but at the same time, by connecting 
the present animals with those that are extinct, adds one to 
the intermediate links of the chain of gradation which must 
prove the most interesting to the comparative anatomist and 
the geologist. 
The animal whose fossil skeleton we have been consider- 
ing, is ascertained by the form of the vertebras, to swim like 
a fish ; and from the shape of its chest must breathe air ; its 
constant residence must also be in the water. The ornitho- 
