371 



cess to Cole's notes, the failure to incorporate hi.s observations in my 

 remark is perhaps excusable. 



The fourth count states that I have made a marked error in my 

 work. In looking it up again in my notes and dissections, which were 

 at once laid aside when Cole informed me that he also was working 

 on Gadus, I fail to rind the recurrent facialis wholly internal to the 

 lateralis vagi, as I had stated. The particular dissection on which my 

 remark was based was a preliminary one and is, unfortunately, not in 

 a condition to permit of its being used to control the statement. A 

 large drawing made from that dissection by one of my assistants, the 

 same one that made the dissection itself, I however rind, and in it the 

 nerves have exactly the relation I ascribed to them, excepting only 

 that a small and almost negligible bundle of the recurrent nerve is shown 

 passing external to the lateral nerve. As I personally controlled this 

 dissection before making the statement I did regarding it, it thus has 

 double testimony in favour of its practical accuracy. In another and later 

 dissection, made by another assistant, and that has been preserved in good 

 condition, I rind the nerve in question wholly external to the lateralis 

 on one side of the head of the specimen, but partly external and 

 partly internal to it on the other. The nerve, in the latter case, sepa- 

 rates into two nearly equal strands, lying close together, and the nervus 

 lateralis passes inward and forward between them. Whether there 

 are, in these several cases, two separate nerves juxtaposed, or not, I 

 am not prepared to say, as the drawings relating to the preliminary 

 dissection are not complete and the other dissections, which are being 

 preserved for future use, have not been carried below the surface. I 

 think, however, that I can safely maintain the accuracy of the state- 

 ment made by me, notwithstanding the fact that I am in evident oppo- 

 osition to so careful a worker as Stannius. As the posterior root of 

 the recurrent nerve in Gadus is said by Cole himself (p. 176) to lie 

 sometimes internal to and sometimes external to the root of the lateralis, 

 he might have seen, in that, a better suggestion of a possible explanation 

 of my statement than the more easily made one of error. 



As to the fifth count, and it is, according to Cole, the "most im- 

 portant" one against me, I confess my inability to see why my failure 

 to refer to this particular "text-book fact" should be characterised as 

 "more extraordinary" than my failure to refer to the other text-book 

 facts to which Cole had already called attention in his first two counts 

 against me. I also am wholly unable to see why, in a memoir relating 

 to Amia , a particular passage should be considered faulty simply 

 because I had failed, in it, to fully note or describe certain conditions 

 in Gadus that had no direct relation whatever to a relatively simple 

 comparison I was seeking to make. 



In further discussion of this same recurrent nerve Cole says 

 (p. 173) : "Here it will be seen that Allis contradicts his own state- 

 ment that the accessory lateral nerve of Amia has not an intracranial 

 course." 



This seems to me a most excellent bit of that special pleading 



