LABYRIN'THODON, a genus of gigantic sauroid batrachians, found in the new red sandstone measures of Great Britain and the continent. The remains of several species have been described, but all so fragmentary that no certain restoration of the genus can yet be made. The head was triangular, 'having a crocodilian appearance both in the shape and in the external sculpturing of the cranial bones, but with well-marked struc tural modifications in the vomer, and in the mode of attachment of the head to the atlas, that stamp it with a batrachian character, conspicuous above the more apparent saurian resemblances. The mouth was furnished with a series of remarkable teeth, numerous and small in the•ateral rows, and with six great laniary teeth in front. The bases of the teeth were anchylosed to distinct shallow sockets. Externally they were marked by a series of longitudinal grooves, which correspond to the inflected folds of the cement. The peculiar and characteristic internal structure of the teeth is very remarkable, and to it these fossils owe their generally accepted generic name of labyrintliodon (labyrinth tooth). The few and fragmentary bones of the body of time animal exhibit a combination of batrachian and crocodilian characters, leaning, however, on the whole, more to the first type. In the same deposits there have been long noticed the prints of feet, which so much resembled the form of the human hand that Kaup, their original describer, gave the generic name of eheirotherium to the great unknown animals which produced them. From the fore being much smaller than the hind foot, he considered that they were the impressions of a marsupial; but this relative difference in the feet exists also in the mod ern batrachians; and the discovery of the remains of so many huge animals belonging to this order, in these very strata, the different sizes of which answer to the different footprints leave little doubt that the cheirotherian footprints were produced by labyrinth °dont reptiles.
LAC, in the East Indies, signifies a sum of 100,000 rupees. A lac of government rupees is equal to .-C9,270.sterlityr; a lac of SICCA rupees, which in some places are also in very general use, is equal to £9,898 sterling. One hundred lass, or ten millions of rupees,
make a crone.
LAC, the general name under which the various products of the Inc insect (coccus lacca) are known. The curious hemipterous insect which yields these'valuable contributions to commerce is in many respects like its congener the cochineal insect (coccus cacti), but it also differs essentially from it the males alone, and those only in their last stage of development, have wings, therefore the whole life of the creature is spent almost on the same spot. They live upon the twigs of trees, chiefly species of buten, ficus. and croton, and soon entomb themselves in a mass of matter, which oozes from small punctures made in the twigs of the tree, and which thus furnishes them with both food and slid ter. It is said that to each male there are at least 5,000 females, and the winged mates are at least twice as large as the females. When a colony, consisting of it few adult females and one or two males, find their way to a new branch, they attach themselves to the bark, and having pierced it with holes, through which they draw up the resinous juices upon which they feed, they become fixed or glued by the superfluous excretion, and after a time die, forming by their dead bodies little domes or tents over the myriads of minute eggs which they have laid. In a short time the eggs burst into life, and the young, which are very minute, eat their way through the dead bodies of their parents, and swarm all over the twig or small young branch of the tree in such countless num bers as to give it the appearance of being covered with a blood-red duet. They soon spread to all parts of the tree where the bark is tender enough to afford them food. and generation after generation dwells upon the same twig until it is enveloped in a coating-, often half an inch in thickness, of the resinous exudation,which is verycelhilar through out, the cells being the casts of the bodies of the dead females. During their they secrete a beautiful purple coloring matter, which does not perish with them, but remains shut up in the cells with the other results of decomposition.