446 JOHN BEARD, 



Certainly, he himself has even now published no observations esta- 

 blishing this impossible proof. On the 5. page of my paper on the 

 branchial sense organs (1885) he will find these words, which would appear 

 to have escaped his notice: "The branchial sense organs, are those sense 

 organs, which have usually been called organs of the lateral line, and 

 were formerly called 'segmental sense organs' by me." And so on, the 

 rest of the passage is concerned with the reasons why the old termi- 

 nology was given up, and a new one suggested. 



As the above passage shows the term "branchial sense organs" 

 to be merely another name for "lateral sense organs", Goronowitsch's 

 statement is absurd, unless I had mistaken some other organs for 

 lateral sense organs, which neither Froriep nor any other observer 

 has yet attempted to prove. Goronowitsch's second and third 

 statements are difficult to reconcile: if the "FRORiEp'sche Anlagen" 

 are problematical, it is difficult to see how it should be known, that 

 they play so important a part in the development of what Goronowitsch 

 terms true ganglia. Objectively regarded, it is patent, that Goro- 

 nowitsch's prolonged and minute investigations into Teleostean de- 

 velopment have failed to furnish him with that elementary insight 

 into the morphological problems of the cranial ganglia and sense or- 

 gans, which the careful examination of even a bare half dozen Elasmo- 

 branch embryos of the right ages would have yielded. 



So far as Ayers and Goronowitsch are concerned, my obser- 

 vations stand just as they did, when first published, quite apart from 

 the repeated confirmation and extension they have undergone at the 

 hands of Prof. Dohrn. Against their accuracy these zoologists and 

 others have merely reiterated assertions to off"er without the vestige 

 of an attempt at proof. 



Froriep's apparently contradictory results did not wait long for 

 refutation. Antipa (1892, p. 690—692) showed, that in fact the con- 

 nection of the cranial nerve or ganglion with the thymus-thickening, 

 identified wrongly by Froriep as equivalent to his "Kiemenspal ten- 

 organ" of mammals, had no existence. Antipa's observation, w'hich 

 if need be can be confirmed by the writer on numerous preparations 

 of Baja and Scyllium, disposed of the supposed connection between 

 cranial ganglion or nerve and thymus, but it did not in reality attempt 

 to deal with the true ventral connection of sensory placode and 

 cranial nerve. 



What led Froriep astray was failure to note, that connection of nerve 

 and sensory placode was a different thing from union of nerve and 



