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Show 426 MR. R. LYDEKKER ON THE SKULL [Mar. 15, The paddle exhibited measures 370 millimetres; a small piece of the proximal extremity of the humerus is broken off, and a few of the distal phalangeals appear to be missing. The specimen has been presented by Mr. Lansdown to the British Museum. p.S. Mr. Horace B. Woodward, F.R.S., has kindly examined the matrix of the specimen, which called to his mind that of some layers of the Lower Lias of Weston near Bath, and on comparing it with samples collected at that locality he found it to agree as closely as possible. The beds are noted in the Memoir on Jurassic Rocks of Britain, vol. iii. p. 134.-G. A. B., 19.3.04. Mr. A. E. Pratt exhibited a series of skins of Paradise-birds which he had recently collected in the Owen Stanley range, British New Guinea; also a series of photographs taken by his son during a two years' residence amongst the natives near the frontier of German New Guinea. The following papers were read :- 1. Note on the Skull and Markings of the Quagga By R. LYDEKKER. [Received February 27,1904.J (Text-figures 84-86.) Readers of the late Sir William Flower's excellent little volume on ' The Horse' will not fail to remember how assiduously the author endeavoured to bring into prominence all evidence of the ancestral history of the family displayed by its existing members. I shall therefore be only emphasising Sir William's own line of investigation if I direct attention to an oversight in regard to one particular vestigial feature met with in certain living members of the Equidce. On page 64 of the work in question, which was published in 1891, will be found a statement to the effect that although the skulls of Hipparion and certain other extinct representatives of the family display a preorbital depression for a face-gland comparable to the larmier of the Deer, yet that no traces of such a pit are to be found in any of the existing species of the family. From this presumed absence of any trace of the face-gland of Hipparion in existing forms of Equus, it has been urged that the latter genus cannot be the lineal descendant of the former. The fact that the late Professor Huxley* in 1870 indicated the existence of a rudimentary preorbital pit in the skull of Equus sivalensis might have been cited in disproof of the inference * Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xxvi. Proceedings, p. 1. |