242 SOME NEW BOOKS [march 



building of a fair palace, with lakes and aquaria, experimental gardens and well- 

 equipped laboratories, where the over-specialised worker may once more get 

 into touch with nature. Prof. Scott devotes himself to a description of the 

 methods employed in modern palaeontological research, taking as an example 

 the fossils of the White River beds. These are traced from the moment of 

 their exhumation to the final setting up of the restored skeleton. The paper is 

 illustrated by photographs, some of which are, unfortunately, somewhat spoiled 

 in reproduction, and is an admirable example of what a popular lecture should 

 be — and so rarely is. 



The other papers in the volume are of a more technical nature, and in most 

 cases display little attempt at literary effect. Mr. Hermon C. Bumpus has an 

 interesting paper on the variations of Passer domesticus, the introduced sparrow. 

 A comparison of 868 American, and the same number of English eggs, showed 

 that the American eggs were much more variable both in colour and in shape 

 than the English, and further, that the mean shape of the American eggs is 

 different from that of the English eggs. The result is interesting, but we wish 

 that Mr. Bumpus had stated the localities from which the eggs were obtained ; 

 the American area is obviously somewhat larger than the British area, and this 

 introduces a possible source of error. Another interesting, though speculative, 

 paper by Dr. Arnold Graf on the physiology of excretion is an attempt to ex- 

 plain the phenomena of excretion in leeches on " mechanical " grounds. Two 

 papers on the centrosome, by Miss Foot and Mr. A. D. Mead respectively, are 

 of interest because their authors both reject Boveri's hypothesis of the great 

 importance of the centrosome in cell-division. An elaborate paper by Dr. 

 Conklin on " Cleavage and Differentiation " is marred by the obscurity of the 

 style and want of care in arrangement. The remaining four papers are devoted 

 to a variety of subjects. 



As a whole, in spite of much that is good, we confess to finding the volume 

 a disappointment. There is no index, in most cases not even connected lists of 

 references, and the absence of an editor is often painfully apparent. Many of 

 the lecturers seem to us to show lack of discretion both in their choice of sub- 

 jects and in their treatment of them under the given circumstances. Finally, 

 the very miscellaneous nature of the contents produces a somewhat painful 

 effect, slightly suggestive of Dr. Blimber's establishment. N. 



THE COLOURS OF ANIMALS AND PLANTS. 



Colour in Nature. A Study in Biology. By Miss Marion I. Newbigin, 

 D.Sc. 8vo, pp. xii. + 344. London: John Murray, 1898. Price 6s. 



Miss Newbigin has performed a useful piece of work in placing before us 

 a book upon colour in nature which abounds in fact and is not dominated and 

 rendered ineffectual by theory. Out of fifteen chapters only one, the last, is 

 devoted to theory ; and that seems to us to be an exceedingly reasonable 

 proportion. There is perhaps no department of biology in which so extra- 

 ordinary a disproportion between fact and theory obtains as in that relating to 

 the colours of animals. To give an example, even the first year's student at a 

 medical school has some notion of the complex structure of the visual organs of 

 the insect and crustacean tribe, and the difference from the analogous organs of 

 the vertebrates. His teacher, if he be a wise person, declines to call the former 

 "eyes": he prefers to term them "visual organs," not in the least on the 

 principle of the journalist who writes of "vehicular traffic," and "the devour- 

 ing element," but simply because he will not prejudge the question of their 

 correspondence with what have been always called eyes, that is, the eyes of 

 vertebrated animals. Yet the reader of any book or article upon colours in 

 animals and plants is requested to believe — or rather it is assumed without 

 any request at all that he does believe — that the physiology of the insect eye 



