112 A. A. W. HUBRECHT. 
authors, and that—as far as its early placental characters go 
—resembles man, the anthropomorphe, and the hedgehog, 
types whose placentation we were willing to regard as corre- 
sponding to primitive arrangements. The fact that modern 
paleontology (vide Weber, ’04, p. 715) admits relationship 
between Hyrax and the fossil Condylarthra (Menicotheride), 
and even (‘fin einer entlegenen Wurzel”’) with the South 
American fossil ''oxodontia, brings the importance of the 
Hyrax placentation in general yet more to the front. 
It should simultaneously be kept in view that the living 
Ungulates ‘are ever so much further specialised from the 
Condylarths than are the living Carnivores from the Creodonts. 
This, of course, affords an a priori probability that the 
Carnivores have as yet less far departed from the original 
arrangement than have the Ungflates. 
And with this & priori conclusion before our minds we will 
now consider the facts of the case. 
d. Other Insectivores, Ungulates, Edentata, and 
Lemures.—In the Insectivores, also distantly related to 
Creodonts and Carnivores, but in many respects more primi- 
tive than the latter, we find a state of things in which the 
destructive faculties of the trophoblast come into play more 
fully yet than in the Carnivores, whereas in the Primates 
(Tarsius, monkeys, and man) that destructive faculty is 
present in quite unabated energy. If we look upon what 
Schoenfeld has above so well depicted for the dog as a 
modified, more benign process, originally derived from the 
first, but in which the endothelium of the maternal capillaries 
is spared by the destructive phagocytic trophoblast, while 
certain other maternal elements of the syncytium ave also 
allowed to associate with the trophoblast without being 
destroyed, then we can imagine the same process yet further 
restricted. We would then have, for example, a denudation 
of the maternal mucosa, local or general, by the destruction 
of the maternal epithelium through the activity of the tropho- 
blast, but the trophospongian reactions in the subepithelial 
maternal tissue might be reduced to a minimum, say to the 
