1897] SOME NEW BOOKS pag i | 
productive of aught but confusion, and we are astonished to find it 
adopted by so careful a worker as Professor Koken. 
We realise the enormous labour expended on this work, which 
may be of use to many under the guidance of a good teacher, and as 
a supplement to scientific palaeontology on the one hand and to field- 
work on the other. But we ourselves prefer Professor Koken when 
playing his other parts of original investigator or high-class populariser. 
MINIATURES BY HANSEN’ 
Tur CHoNrosTOMATIDAE. A Family of Copepoda, Parasites on Crustacea Malacostraca. 
By Dr H. J. Hansen. 4to, pp. 206, with thirteen copper plates. At the expense 
of the Carlsberg Fund. [Author’s Motto:—‘‘ We want facts, not inferences, 
observations, not theories, fora long time to come.”—WNatural Science, 1896.] 
Copenhagen : Andr. Fred. Host & Son, 1897. 
WirTHIN the memory of men still living an artist could obtain a 
respectable reputation and a good income by painting miniatures. 
The features of the original might reach any assignable degree of the 
plain and the commonplace. It mattered not; the portrait on ivory 
was always like and always lovely. All this delightful flattery has 
been destroyed or banished by photography, cheap and(sometimes)cruel. 
But Dr Hansen’s volume proves that there are mysteries of portraiture 
with which the camera is still incapable of dealing. Though the 
likenesses are not those of decorated officers or fashionable beauties, 
but of forms more fitted to excite wonder than admiration, the picture 
of each is drawn by him with exquisite delicacy of touch and the 
most minute attention to detail. Each is confined within the compass 
of an inch or two. But really this is a gigantic enlargement. The 
true miniature is the natural object, often only one-hundredth of an 
inch in length, and sometimes much less. Under a powerful micro- 
scope animals of this size may beccme decently conspicuous. The 
same can scarcely be said of the mouth, which in the Choniostomatidae 
is not only absolutely but relatively small. It may be left to pro- 
fessed arithmeticians to calculate the dimensions of their two pairs of 
antennae and three pairs of jaws and the joints thereof, all which 
need observing for purposes of full and accurate scientific description. 
When it is added that the animals are not transparent, and that they 
will not submit to pressure, the microphotographer will probably 
leave them for the present, without attempting to challenge the 
deftness of Dr Hansen’s pencil. 
For the neglect which this curious family has till lately ex- 
perienced there is more excuse than usual. The poet might bewail 
that in labouring to be short he became obscure. These Copepoda 
were probably short without labour and obscure by preference. How 
else can we account for their choosing to belong to the neglected class 
of crustacea, choosing a life of self-effacement within that class, 
schoosing their hosts chiefly among its unpopular and little known 
sessile-eyed groups, and burying themselves for the most part in 
brood-pouches and branchial cavities? To be plain, they are crus- 
taceans parasitic on crustaceans principally on Amphipods, Isopods, 
and Cumacea, having been found in only a few instances on stalk- 
eyed shrimps. <A solitary species courts the public gaze on the outside 
of its host’s body. 
