The new reptile advertised in “Geol.  Mag.” has turned up in the way of business, and I could not help giving a notice of it, or I should not have undertaken anything fresh just now.

The Spitzbergen things are very different, and I have taken sundry looks at them and put them by again to let my thoughts ripen.

They are Ichthyosaurian, and I am not sure they do not belong to two species.  But it is an awful business to compare all the Ichthyosaurians.  I think that one form is new.  Please to tell Nordenskiold this much.

[However, his chief interest was in the anatomy of birds, at which he had been working for some time, and especially the development of certain of the cranial bones as a basis of classification.  On April 11, expanding one of his Hunterian Lectures, he read a paper on this subject at the Zoological Society, afterwards published in their “Proceedings” for 1867.

As he had found the works of Professor Cornay of help in the preparation of this paper, he was careful to send him a copy with an acknowledgment of his indebtedness, eliciting the reply, “c’est si beau de trouver chez l’homme la science unie a la justice.”

He followed this up with another paper on “The Classification and Distribution of the Alectoromorphae and Heteromorphae” in 1868, and to the work upon this the following letter to his ally, W.K.  Parker, refers:—­]

Royal Geological Survey of Great Britain, Jermyn Street, July 17, 1867.

My dear Parker,

Nothing short of the direct temptation of the evil one could lead you to entertain so monstrous a doctrine, as that you propound about Cariamidae.

I recommend fasting for three days and the application of a scourge thrice in the twenty-four hours!  Do this, and about the fourth day you will perceive that the cranial differences alone are as great as those between Cathartes and Serpentarius.

If you want to hear something new and true it is this:—­

1.  That Memora is more unlike all the other Passerines (i.e.  Coracomorphae) than they are unlike one another, and that it will have to stand in a group by itself.

It is as much like a wren as you are—­less so, in fact, if you go on maintaining that preposterous fiction about Serpentarius.

2.  Wood-peckers are more like crows than they are like cuckoos.

Aegithognathae.

Coracomorphae.

Desmognathae.

Cypselomorphae.—­Coccygomorphae.—­Gecinomorphae. [Shown on a horizontal line between Coracomorphae and Desmognathae.]

3.  Sundevell is the sharpest fellow who has written on the classification of birds.

4.  Nitzsch and W.K.  Parker [Except in the case of Serpentarius.] are the sharpest fellows who have written on their osteology.

5.  Though I do not see how it follows naturally on the above, still, where can I see a good skeleton of Glareola?