clvi GENERAL SUMMARY OF SCIENTIFIC AND 



"History of North American Birds," as no such comprehen- 

 sive work has appeared since the publication of Audubon's 

 "Birds of America." A number of short papers on the dis- 

 tribution and habits of North American birds, by Dr. Coues, 

 Messrs. Ridgway, Brewer, Henshaw, Allen, and Lawrence, 

 have appeared in various journals, etc. The English Ibis 

 and Cabanis's German journal of ornithology are filled with 

 new matter relating to this department, and shows that the 

 very general interest taken in birds is unabated. 



Professor Peters finds new coincidences between the de- 

 velopment of the Coecilice and other Batrachians. He states 

 that these creatures possess neither amnion nor allantois, 

 that they are, at least in part, viviparous, and that at a cer- 

 tain period of the year they are aquatic. 



That the common striped snake (Eutamia) and allied genera 

 are viviparous had been well known, but Professor Cope has 

 discovered that the snakes of the genus Storeria also bring 

 forth their young alive. He also describes a fossil lizard 

 from the Miocene formation of Colorado. He calls it Pelto- 

 saurus, and says that it is a member of a family of lizards 

 still existing in Mexico and California. He also describes a 

 number of Batrachians and Nematognatld brought from the 

 Upper Amazon by Professor Orton. The Cuban crocodile, 

 already known as an inhabitant of Eastern Florida, has now 

 been found in Western Florida by Mr. Maynard. 



A recent list by Dr. Gundlach of the Mammals of Cuba 

 invites renewed attention to the remarkable paucity of spe- 

 cies in that island. Of twenty-four kinds enumerated, nine- 

 teen are bats, the remainder being made up of one Solenodon 

 (an insectivorous mammal), three species of Gapvomys (por- 

 cupine-like rodents), and one manatee. 



Mr. E. R. Lankester, in referring to what has been called 

 the recapitulation hypothesis, and applying this to the hu- 

 man race, remarks that the earliest commencement of a 

 human being was a small speck of protoplasm of mucus-like 

 consistency, such as existed in ponds. A later stage exhib- 

 ited him as a small sac, composed of two layers of living 

 corpuscles, which he inherited from polyp -like ancestors, 

 and was to-day seen in polyps. Still later he was an elon- 

 gated creature, with slits in the side of the neck, which, like 

 the gill-slits of a shark, he inherited from a shark-like ances- 



