404 RANDOLPH WEST 



spending to the point of penetration of each venous branch of 

 the intermuscular septum, and that afterward they gradually 

 increase in nmnber and come to lie near each other. He points 

 out that at the end of the seventh day many of the little 'fissures' 

 have fused to give rise to larger spaces, so that the spaces, sepa- 

 rate at first, have finally established irregular communications 

 between themselves, by breaking down their mesenchymal 

 partitions. He goes on to show that by the end of the eighth 

 day the ensemble of the cavities is transformed into a kind of 

 a sac, still communicating with the first five coccygeal veins and 

 later with the general lymphatic system, which develops inde- 

 pendently by fusion of intercellular mesenchymal spaces at first 

 appearing along the veins of the hypogastric plexus. The 

 cavities at this stage often contain red blood cells and some- 

 times appear quite full of them, and by a condensation of 

 mesenchymal cells the wall of the lymph hearts are formed. 

 The rest of this paper, which does not especially concern us, 

 shows that the lymph hearts increase in volume up to the six- 

 teenth day, that the first and fifth coccygeal veins lose their con- 

 nections with the hearts during this period, and that the con- 

 nection of the lymph hearts with the independently developed 

 general lymphatic system occurs toward the end of the tenth 

 day. During the remainder of embryonic life the lymph hearts 

 persist, but shortly after the chick is hatched they commence 

 to degenerate. Traces of the degenerating lymph hearts were 

 found in a chicken thirty-five days after hatching. 



Alierzejewski, in 1909 (2), published an article on the origin 

 of the lymphatic vessels in birds, which was presented by M. H. 

 Hoyer before the Academy of Sciences of Cracow. Concerning 

 the origin of the posterior lymph hearts he agrees with Sala, 

 except that he holds that the first anlagen appear in the middle 

 of the sixth day of incubation, and not, as Sala states, in the 

 first hours of the seventh day. 



Stromsten (3) has published two papers in 1910 and 1911 on 

 the development of the posterior lymph heart in turtles. He 

 finds that their development is initiated in the logger-head turtle 

 by the vacuolization of the post-iliac mesenchymal tissue during 



