'xx SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



remaining families being reserved for the second part, now we believe 

 in an advanced state. Habits, structure, reproduction and metamor- 

 phosis, and geographical distribution, all receive adequate attention, 

 and are described in popular terms in a manner permitting of ready 

 service in either the field or study ; and an enthusiastic keynote struck 

 in the preface pervades the book from cover to cover, author, artists, 

 and all concerned having combined to produce a work which, while 

 marking a new departure of the Ray Society, will perhaps do as much 

 towards encouraging a love of field natural history as any work of 

 its time. The author is notorious for his painstaking enthusiasm as a 

 zoological investigator, even a holiday being to him of no avail unless 

 he have access to the haunts of his favourite animals, and in the pages 

 of this book we find combined with much that is technical and which, 

 as published elsewhere, has helped to render him famous, a vast 

 accumulation of observations made during holiday-time which, while 

 materially extending our knowledge of local distribution and habit, by 

 its very nature appeals the more directly to the outdoor naturalist and 

 passer-by. The weakest portion of the book is the anatomical. The 

 author professedly ignores the anatomy of the nervous, higher sensory, 

 and circulatory systems, and of the soft parts other than the lungs 

 and urinogenital organs, for reasons duly given ; but as concerning the 

 latter, confusion for which the author is little responsible appears to have 

 arisen in the description of the " vesicula seminalis " vas efferens and 

 their alleged relationships to the genital ducts and omission in that of 

 the vestiges of the latter in the male Rana, while in the general anatomi- 

 cal terminology considerable revision might be highly advantageous. 

 When critical, the author brings to bear the full force of his lengthened 

 experience with marked effect, as, for example, in his denunciation of 

 the popular belief that the tadpole metamorphosis is recapitulatory of 

 phylogeny, which we most heartily support. The book is what it 

 professes to be, and by its aid the wayside naturalist should find no 

 difficulty in determining the species and all that is important for 

 taxonomic study of our European forms. To the field naturalist it 

 will be indispensable, and without it no zoological library can be 

 complete. Of all branches of science the zoologists is the most humanis- 

 ing, and it is by works such as that now under review that the mind 

 may be most readily awakened through the beauties to the more philo- 

 sophic aspects of vital phenomena, the fuller study of which affords a 

 mental discipline second to none other and a means of happiness as 

 inexhaustible as it is beneficial. We eagerly await the appearance of 

 the second part, and regard it a national duty of the Ray Society to 

 provide, if possible, for a third or fourth part, which shall be devoted 

 to the tailed Batrachians, especially since recent study of them has 

 revealed structural and functional conditions unique and unsuspected, 

 such as are pre-eminently calculated to arouse the real appreciation 

 of the instructive in Nature through the gratification of the desire for 

 the sensational and curious, always present in the public mind. 



