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Show 630 LETTER FROM MR. GERARD KREFFT. [Nov. 7, about my son having been attacked by some unknown ferocious animal in the bush. It was simply this. One evening strolling along a path close to the shore of Rockingham Bay, a small terrier, m y son's companion, took a scent up from a piece of scrub near the beach, and followed, barking furiously, towards the coast-range westwards. My boy (thirteen years of age, but an old bushman, w ho would put half those described in novels to the blush) followed and found in the long grass, about half a mile from the spot the scent was first taken up, an animal described by himself as follows :-' It was lying camped in the long grass and was as big as a native Dog; its face was round like that of a Cat, it had a long tail, and its body was striped from the ribs under the belly with yellow and black. My Dog flew at it, but it could throw him. When they were together I fired m y pistol at its head; the blood came. The animal then ran up a leaning tree, and the Dog barked at it. It then got savage and rushed down the tree at the Dog and then at me. I got frightened and came home.' " It was just dark when the boy came home in a high state of excitement and told m e the story. From inquiry I find that this is not the first time a similar animal has been seen in this neighbourhood. Tracks of a sort of Tiger have been seen in Dalrymple's Gap by people camping there, and Mr. Reginald Uhr, now Police M a gistrate at St. George, whilst one of the native mounted police officers in this district, saw the same animal m y son describes. The country is so sparsely populated, and the jungles (or, as we call them here, ' scrubs') so dense and so little known, that I have no doubt that animals of this kind exist in considerable numbers, the abundance of food and their timidity preventing our more intimate knowledge of their habits. I shall be most happy to send you, should it be m y good fortune to drop across one of them, its skin and skeleton. I only regretted, as m y poor boy did, that he had not my revolver, as he says he stood, when it was fighting with the Dog, at less than a yard from the animal." A letter was read from Mr. Gerard Krefft, dated Sydney, April 19th, 1871, in which, after stating that the skeleton of Dioplodon seychellensis, lately added to the Australian Museum (see P. Z. S. 1870, p. 426), has "the usual seven cervical vertebrae, four of which are free, the last bearing a short quadrangular piece of bone 1 \ inch long by 1 inch broad; nine dorsals bearing ribs, five of which join on to the sternum, which consists of four pieces; and twenty-nine lumbar and caudal vertebr_e," he adds, " I have been fortunate enough to obtain the skeleton of a second small Whale, evidently closely allied to the Mesoplodon sowerbiensis, figured by M M. Van Beneden and Gervais (Osteographie des Ce'taces, pl. xxii.). This animal had been stranded at Little Bay, between Botany Bay and Long Bay, distant six or seven miles from Sydney. The carcass was much cut, and I had the greatest difficulty in obtaining the missing fragments of bones. The head fared very badly, and was almost |