

xlii SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



of Morphology, restricting that term solely to the study of the yet 

 living forms. When, however, we turn to the record of progress, and 

 consider the more revolutionary of our classificatory schemes, which 

 after all are but popular expression of the growth of knowledge, it 

 must be admitted that the influence of palaeontology is paramount 

 and would seem likely to continue so. In their direct bearing upon our 

 interest in living organisms, what more luminous than the discoveries 

 of Seeley and Andrews on the Plesiosaurian limb girdles (so intuitively 

 expressed in the generic name Cryptoclidus) as helping us towards a 

 better conception of the affinities of the anomalous Chelonia ; or the 

 wonderful series of Permian fossils forming the " Eotetrapoda " of 

 Credner, as showing that after all Hatteria, as affecting our conceptions 

 of the inter-relationships of the lower terrestrial vertebrata, is perhaps 

 the most wonderful and structurally central of those extant ; or again, 

 the unearthing in the United States of better and more complete 

 remains of the Ancylopoda, as affecting our time-honoured and most 

 cherished conceptions of correlation in tooth and limb structure among 

 mammals ? Palaeontological discoveries such as these, like those of 

 camels having a full series of incisors, of annectant giraffine forms, and 

 the like, have not been lost sight of by those who take a broad survey 

 of progress ; and, considered alone, they serve as examples of palaeon- 

 tological study, having a far-reaching influence on our ideas of inter- 

 relationship and structural affinity which transcends those of most purely 

 embryological investigations, and justify the assertion that palaeontology 

 is not only a branch of morphology, but a foremost one, perhaps more 

 forcible than the rest, and that the promise given in the earlier dis- 

 covery of Archaeopteryx and the Odontornithes has been amply ful- 

 filled. And as concerning the palaeontology of the vertebrata it may 

 be remarked that since Huxley's memorable Anatomy of Vertebrated 

 Animals, no vertebrate text-book has accorded the subject fitting re- 

 cognition. In the work before us, the aforenamed important topics 

 receive due treatment, and ample allusion is to be found to the splendid 

 series of mammalian remains described from the United States deposits 

 by Cope, Marsh, Osborn, Scott and Wortmann, and their associates, 

 as to the work of Marsh, Dollo and Hulke on the Dinosauria ; of Seeley 

 and Newton on the Anomodontia ; of Moreno and Lydekker on the 

 fossil vertebrata of the Argentines ; of Ameghino, Forsyth Major and 

 others, which with them rank foremost in interest among morphological 

 discoveries of recent years having tangible and far-reaching results. 

 Nor has the author of the present volume been behind his fellow- 

 workers in contributing to this end. His investigations on and classi- 

 fication of the fishes are now universally recognised and adopted, and 

 it is in no sense derogatory to the text-books of Palaeontology by 

 Nicholson and Lydekker and Zittel, which since the memorable treatise 

 by Owen have been foremost in the field, to say that the present one 

 for the first time places the student in possession of a work in which 

 the subject is laid before them in a concise and readable form, not over- 



