110 The Ottawa Naturalist. [October 



same as the blood of the animals in the early ages of the world, 

 and transmitted to us in the course of seonic development? 

 Professor Macallum's results suggest this. Mammalian serum 

 in its proportions of sodium, calcium and potassium, is not 

 unlike the fluid contents of the jellyfish. The evolutionist can 

 now claim that our blood, apart from the red corpuscles, has 

 come down to us from an ancestral stock as lowly as the me- 

 dusae, and as remote in time as the Jurassic and even the primi- 

 tive Palaeozoic epochs! Hardly less wonderful is the con- 

 clusion that the inorganic composition of jellyfishes is not due 

 to the sea-water environment of to-day, but "reflects the com- 

 position of sea-water .... of past geological periods, 

 possibly very remote periods." Divested of technical terms 

 and abstruse expressions, Professor Prince's account of Dr. 

 Macallum's remarkable researches, compressed into seven pages 

 of these "Further Contributions," furnishes reading of rare and 

 profound interest to all scientific students. 



In reviewing a publication so welcome and of such unusual 

 interest to all scientific students, it might appear to be super- 

 fluous to call attention to errors and to faults, typographical 

 or otherwise. Some such faults there are, and it would have 

 been well to have avoided or corrected them before issue from 

 the press. In Professor Wright's paper the references to the 

 literature are in some cases detailed in the text, in other cases 

 they are relegated to the last page of the paper. This should 

 have been avoided. The magnification of the figures in the 

 plates should have been given in all cases, whereas in nearly 

 half the figures there is no clue to the size of the organisms. 

 Many readers will wonder what size, for example, are the interest- 

 ing tailed Ascidian larvae on Plate VII. (figs. 11 and 12). An 

 even graver complaint is justifiable regarding the description of 

 plates in Professor Prince's paper. Thus on Plate VIII, figs. 

 6c and 7 are described as the pilchard (they are evidently young 

 gaspereaux), while figs. 10 and 11, described on page 109 as 

 gaspereaux, are pilchard, and are copied as stated on page 108 

 from Mr. J. T. Cunningham's w^ell-known and not very good 

 figures in the Journal of the Marine Biological Station of Britain. 

 On page 57 in Dr. MacKay's very accurate paper Licmophora 

 IS misprinted Licmphora, while the only misprint apparently in 

 the venerable Dr. Fowler's botanical list is oe for ae in Gramineae 

 (page 67). On page 76 Memhranipora is there spelt Men not 

 Mem, while on page 101 the famiHar term Clupeidae has the 

 grotesque form Clupieidae. Finallv, on page 89 the page heading 

 to Mr. Cornish's notes on the fishes of Canso appears as "The 

 Marine Polyzoa of Canso, Nova Scotia." 



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