Bibliographical Notices. 187 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICES. 



Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Vertebrate 

 Animals : Part I. Fishes, being Vol. II. of Hunterian Lectures. 

 By Richard Owen, F.R.S. London, Longman and Co., 1846. 



Prepared as we had already been from all the former labours of our 

 distinguished author to form high expectations with regard to the 

 present work, We rejoice to find that these have been bo richly ful- 

 filled, and that in thus embodying the results of his own investi- 

 gations and those of others in a definite form, available at once 

 to the student and the matured scientific inquirer, Professor Owen 

 has been at work with the same untiring eye and hand, animated 

 and guided by the same profound and philosophic spirit of analysis 

 when applied to the higher organisms or Vertebrata, as heretofore. 

 As in Vol. I., this, which is devoted exclusively to Fishes, commences 

 as a sequel to the Introductory Lecture with a clear and ample sur- 

 vey of the leading or typical characters by which the Vertebrate ani- 

 mals in general are distinguished from the Invertebrata ; allusion is 

 then made to the " amount of concordance which will justify us in 

 predicating unity of organization" between any members of these two 

 great types, and it is shown that to do this we must look to the 

 very beginning of the development of the vertebrated being, in 

 which, " in the mysterious properties of the impregnated ger- 

 minal vesicle, diflfused and distributed by fissiparous multiplication 

 amongst countleos nucleated cells, is an organic correspondence to 

 be first traced with the lowest and simplest beginnings of animal 

 life — with the infusorial monads." Attention is next directed to the 

 second stage in the development of the ovum, when with the appear- 

 ance of the double chord the nascent being is impressed with its 

 vertebrated type ; after which follow full descriptions of the several 

 classes of Fishes, Reptiles, Birds and Mammalia, with reference not 

 only to their anatomical, but geological, grade of succession through 

 the various strata of the earth's crust. We pass over the intervening 

 five chapters, designing to reserve their consideration for the last, 

 and are met for the first time in our language with a clear and definite 

 outline at Lecture VII. of the conditions general as well as special 

 displayed by the muscular system of Fishes, although, adds the Pro- 

 fessor, " the determination of the special, serial, and general homo- 

 logies, and the recognition of the various individual adaptive modi- 

 fications, of the muscles of Fishes, still remains a rich and little-ex- 

 plored field foi* the labours of the myologist." With the discourse 

 upon the nervous system, as it commences in theLancelet by a simple 

 Continuous chord, more obtuse only at the anterior end, where its ho- 

 mology to the ganglionic brain of the higher species is indicated by 

 connexion with the trigeminal and optic nerves, we have been most 

 especially interested : first and foremost by the adoption of a rational, 

 or the only true kind of scientific nomenclature, for the several parts 

 composing the nervous axis, such, e.g. as the terms prosencephalon, 

 mesencephalon and epencephalon, as expressive first of the cerebrum, 



