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Show 976 MESSRS. LISTER AND FLETCHER ON THE [Dec. 13, skeleton is now carefully set up in the small museum in that city. It is 48 feet long ; and part of the whalebone remains m the jaw. There are also bones of a whale found in the sands at Deva, in the same museum. I was given part of a whale's rib dug up on the Lequeitio beach; and a jawbone, which was long in the courtyard of the palace of the Marques de San Estevan at Gijon, is now preserved in the Jovellanos Institute of the same town. Of course there must be any number of bones buried in the sand of the beaches where so many hundreds of whales have been flensed in former centuries. In 1878 the accomplished historian of Guipuzcoa, D o n Nicolas Soraluce, printed a pamphlet at Vitoria on " the origin and history of the whale and cod fisheries," which contains much interesting information. I may add that Seiior Soraluce is preparing some additional chapters on the whale-fishery, and that he expects to obtain copies of interesting documents relating to the same subject from the archives of the Ministry of Marine at Madrid. 2. O n the Condition of the Median Portion of the Vagiual Apparatus in the Maeropodidse. B y J. J. L I S T E R , B.A., F.Z.S., St. John's College, Cambridge, Demonstrator of Comparative Anatomy in the University of C a m bridge, and J. J. F L E T C H E R , M . A . (Syd.), B.Se. (Lond.). [Received November 8,1881.] In the Marsupialia, as is now well known, the female reproductive organs consist of two ovaries, two oviducts, two uteri, two vaginae, a urogenital sinus, and a clitoris. The vaginae are variously complicated in the various families comprising the order ; but in the Kangaroos the vaginal apparatus may be described in general terms as consisting of a median portion (formed by the union and more or less complete coalescence of the portions of the Miillerian ducts which succeed the uteri), and of the two lateral portions (which curve outward and backward somewhat like the handles of a vase, and open distally, but without making any projection, into the urogenital chamber). They are what are usually known as the two vagina}. The median portion is usually described as approaching the urogenital chamber more or less closely, but as ending blindly, thus forming a cul-de-sac, and as being connected with it simply by connective tissue. A considerable number of observers have met with the median vaginal portion in a condition very different from that just described, inasmuch as its tissue was found to be continuous with that of the urogenital passage, and, what is still more interesting, the two chambers communicated with one another by an aperture situated immediately above that of the meatus urinarius. |