_Bufo cornuta._ This animal, which has been stigmatized as the most prodigiously deformed _creature_ known to exist!! is generally supposed to inhabit North America as well as Surinam. I do not think it has ever been found in North America. Shaw, in Nodder's Nat. Misc. says it is principally found in Virginia, but in his General Zoology, I think he says that Seba was in error when he represented its native country to be North America. Two other species of _Bufo_ have been correctly stated to inhabit this country, viz. _B. musicus_, and _Crapaud rougeâtre_, Daud. (B. rubidus) first noticed as distinct by Mr. William Bartram. I discovered a third species on the banks of St. John's river, East Florida, which, as I am not at present prepared to describe, I shall not surreptitiously name. It is, I conceive, an incumbent duty on the describer of a natural object, to deposit his specimen, or a duplicate, when practicable, in some cabinet or museum, to which he should refer, in order that subsequent writers may be satisfied with the accuracy of his observations, by examining for themselves. By such reference, and by the re-examination of the same objects by others, the plethoric redundance of synonyma, that prolific source of accumulating error, will be banished or elucidated, and naturalists will most readily arrive at the knowledge of truth, which is, or ought to be, the grand leading object of their labours. PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY. ART. XI. _Outline of a Theory of Meteors._ _By_ WM. G. REYNOLDS, M.D. _Middletown Point, New-Jersey_. Should the progress of science, for a century to come, keep pace with its rapid advancement for the last fifty years, many appearances in the physical world, now enveloped in obscurity, will then admit of as easy solution as the combustion of inflammable substances, or any familiar process in chemistry does at this day. Among the many subjects from which the veil of mystery would thus be raised, we may include those luminous appearances, in the aerial regions, called meteors, which I am about to consider in the following essay; and which seem to constitute a distinct class of bodies of considerable variety. Meteors were regarded by the ancients as the sure prognostics of great and awful events in the moral and physical world; and were divided by them into several species, receiving names characteristic of the various forms and appearances they assumed; but of their opinions, as to the physical cause of these phenomena, the ancients have left us nothing solid or instructive. The moderns, more enlightened, have ceased to regard these bodies with the superstitious awe of former ages; but in respect to the cause thereof, are perhaps but little in advance of their predecessors, having, I believe, produced nothing yet that will bear the test of philosophical investigation.