14 NOTES AND COMMENTS [suLY 
the spider “does not stop to pull out the captives, wring their necks, 
and throw them into a bag. It gathers up its net and postpones the 
work of revision until it gets home.” This interesting paper will be 
found in Zoologisches Jahrbuch, xii. (1899), pp. 161-169, 1 pl. and 1 fig. 
K pur si muove! 
WE could not find a finer instance of the progress of science—which 
it is part of the function of our journal to record—than Dr. (now Sir) 
J. Burdon Sanderson’s Croonian Lecture, delivered to the Royal Society 
of London on March 16, “On the relation of motion in animals and 
plants to the electrical phenomena which are associated with it.” 
The progress to which we refer might be best indicated by a 
summary of the actual results and suggestive hints to which the lecture 
gives expression, but it seems more picturesque and not less important 
to cite the first two paragraphs, for they indicate as it were graphically 
the strides of modern physiology to which the baronet’s genius has 
given so much force. 
“In a Croonian Lecture which I delivered to the Royal Society in 
1867—more than thirty years ago—I exhibited a number of diagrams 
of graphic records in evidence of the mechanical relations which I then 
sought to establish between the movements of the heart and those of 
respiration in the higher animals. 
“T have to-day to bring before you results which have also been 
obtained by a graphic method, which however differs from the other in 
that the records are written by light, and not by pen on paper; that 
the time taken in recording is measured in thousandths of seconds, not 
tenths; and finally, that the events recorded are not the movements of 
the chest or heart, but the electrical changes which, as will be shown, 
are found to associate themselves with all manifestations of functional 
activity in living organisms, whenever these take place under conditions 
which admit of their being investigated.” 
A Complementary Male. 
Many years ago Darwin discovered a little creature living on the 
barnacle, Scalpellum vulgare, which he at first regarded as a parasite 
and afterwards as a “complementary male.” In other cases, as is well 
known, he found a similar dimorphism,—minute complementary males 
fixed to the hermaphrodite barnacles, and in some rare species to 
females. Since Darwin’s work there has been little if any re-investiga- 
tion of the complementary male of Scalpellum vulgare, but it has recently 
