distantly related _Inia_ from South America, are both at the present day exclusively fluviatile, may point to the freshwater origin of the whole group, in which case their otherwise rather inexplicable absence from the seas of the Cretaceous period would be accounted for. “On the other hand, it should be observed that the teeth of the Zeuglodonts approximate more to a carnivorous than to an ungulate type.” This difficulty with regard to the teeth is indeed one which it is impossible to disregard, since it is scarcely credible that grinding teeth such as characterise herbivorous mammals of all descriptions could ever have been modified into the teeth of whales, either living or extinct. There is, moreover, the unmistakable resemblance presented by the cheek-teeth of the aforesaid extinct zeuglodons to those of Carnivora. Both these facts seem to point to the derivation of toothed whales, at any rate, from flesh-eating rather than herbivorous mammals; although they have certainly no relationship with the eared seals. Since the foregoing passage was written it has been practically demonstrated that the toothed whales, at any rate, are the descendants of primitive Carnivora. Professor E. Fraas, of Stuttgart, and Dr. C. W. Andrews, of the British Museum, have, for instance, shown that the zeuglodons are derived from the Eocene group of Carnivora known as Creodontia; while there is every reason for regarding the zeuglodons themselves as the ancestors of modern toothed whales. CHAPTER VII ANTHROPOLOGICAL WORK The study of the physical characters of the various native races of the human species—that is to say, anthropology, in contradistinction to ethnology—occupied a very prominent position in Sir William Flower’s scientific career; and it is difficult to say whether this or the study of whales was the branch of biology on which his greatest interest was concentrated. Perhaps we might say that the two together formed his especially favourite subjects. Whereas, however, as we have seen in the last chapter, he was studying the Cetacea at least as early as the year 1864, when papers from his pen were published, anthropology does not appear to have been seriously taken up by him till considerably later in life; the first papers and lectures by him that have come under the writer’s notice dating from 1878.