So 



HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



Species 

 Genera 



Excluded species 

 Sub-species . 

 Genus 

 Sub-species . 



Genus 



Chorley, Lancashire. 



E. parvula 



Isolepis and Blysmus 



Carcx Davalliana 



C. paradox a .... 



Triticum 



T. pungens (Agropyrum) 

 T. acutum ,, 



Selaginella .... 



Transferred to Scirpus. 



Are suppressed, and their species included in 



Scirpus ; Blysmus compressus becoming 3". 



cartas with former name as syn. 

 Elevated to rank of species. 

 Transferred from C. tercthiscida to C. paniculate 

 Becomes Agropyrum. 

 Transferred from junceum to repens. 



Elevated to rank of order, including in it genus 

 Isoetes. 



F. J. George. 



PATHOLOGY AND ITS RELATION TO 

 EVOLUTION. 



THE lectures of Mr. J. Bland Sutton on Pathology 

 and its Relation to Evolution, at the Royal 

 College of Surgeons, this session, beside possess- 

 ing interest to the members of that college in 

 general, have a still more interesting and profounder 

 interest to naturalists. Hence I do not consider it 

 impertinent nor inapposite in the pages of this 

 journal, commanding as it does an exceeding great 

 circulation among workers in science both at home 

 and abroad, to summarise the chief features of the 

 substance-matter of these lectures, and moreover to 

 look at them from a generalised and open point of 

 view. In a bold, and almost in a novel sense, has 

 Mr. Sutton brought the laws of evolution to bear on 

 many facts which belong more especially to our own 

 domain of work. 



The purport of Mr. Sutton's lectures is to illustrate 

 the second law of evolution as laid down by Huxley * 

 that "certain parts have undergone complete or 

 partial suppression " — and I shall follow in this short 

 review the lines of the syllabus as closely as is con- 

 sistent with explanatory details. 



I. The oscentrale. — In the diagram (Fig. 35) of the 

 hand of a baboon, will be noticed a little bone marked 

 r in the drawing, — the os centrale — wedged in between 

 two tiers of bones (carpus), the one rank in intimate 

 relation with the bones in the forearm, the other in 

 immediate nearness to the metacarpus. This bone you 

 meet with as you search the branches and branchlets of 

 the zoological tree, beginning at the tailed amphibians 

 and working upwards to the primates. Some time 

 back there were three observers — Henke, Rayher, and 

 Rosenberg — who "spotted" a nodule of cartilage in 

 the same position in the human foetus, but which, as 

 development proceeded, disappeared — an observation 

 that has been confirmed many times over and over 

 again since then. Euber, Turner, and others, found 

 it afterwards in adult hands, and now we have a 

 computation that in four cases out of a hundred it 

 is persistent. When not so it fuses with the radiale. 

 Here then, as Mr. Sutton rightly concludes, is distinct 

 evidence of the suppression of an element in man's 



* "On the Arrangement of the Mammalia," Proc. Zool. Soc. 

 1880, p. 649 



carpus, but how many might have been suppressed he 

 leaves an open question, for Weidersheim says the 

 axolotl might have had two or even three of these 

 bones. 



2. The second point is concerned with the pineal 

 body, which I have heretofore spoken about in a 

 note in these pages. 



[I must premise that, with regard to suppressed 

 parts, Mr. Sutton would hurry us into the not un- 

 likely belief, that owing to and from the very nature 

 of their suppression they are liable to disease and 

 aberrant growths.] 



Fig. 35. — The Manus of a Baboon, c, os centrale. r, 11, in, 

 mi, v, first, second, third, fourth, and fifth metacarpals. 



That the pineal body is one of these suppressed 

 organs is pretty evident from the recent work of 

 Graaf and Spencer (Mr. Spencer's paper in " Nature " 

 of last year will be remembered, and also an elaborate 

 and beautifully illustrated article in the recent 

 " Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science "), who 

 have shown that it is still represented as a little median 

 eye in the parietal foramen of lizards. In amphibians 

 of the pre-tertiary epoch it seems to have been func- 

 tional and in good account. But Nature, like a good 

 mother, but withal a fair amount of spleen and ill- 

 will, sometimes developes a teratoma, or else as is the 

 generality of her caprice, a cyst in the selfsame body. 



3. The lost incisor tooth of man. — And now with 

 regard to a matter that had almost become common- 

 talk at the ingle-nook — the lost incisor tooth of man. 

 This is one of the clearest evidences of suppression 

 that we can possibly think of. Professor Albrecht 

 was the first to notice the reappearance sometimes of 

 a third incisor, and since then we have had hosts of 



