1875.] Notices of Books. IOI 
transformed (although we must suppose that by such transfor- 
mation it has attained its highest development and perfection) 
has ever yet reproduced its kind, and this in spite of every effort 
made to promote reproduction by diet, and as to putting together 
males and females both transformed, also transformed males 
with females untransformed, and males untransformed with 
females transformed. Indeed, the sexual organs seem even to 
become atrophied in these transformed individuals. Moreover, 
all this time the untransformed individuals have gone on bringing 
forth young with the utmost fecundity.” 
We do not know of any modern observation more calculated to 
stagger a naturalist of the old school. The power of reproduction 
in every species was heretofore regarded as necessarily correlated 
with the highest development and full maturity. Here, on the 
contrary, we see such power left behind as a species advances 
to perfection. 
The author suggests the possibility that the genus Meno- 
branchus may be a “persistent larval form, and which now 
never attains its adult state.’’ These considerations have an 
important bearing both upon the genesis and the extinction of 
species. The reader will not fail to remark that a current of 
what some will call anti-Darwinism pervades the whole work. 
In how far either the author or Mr. Darwin is in the right, and 
whether either of them has done more than apprehend some 
phases of a truth not yet revealed to us in its entirety, we shall 
not presume to determine. But we must point out that Mr. 
Mivart’s polemic is strictly scientific, and, therefore, legitimate, 
based as it is on a searching morphological and physiological 
analysis of organic forms, and on a review of their mutual 
relations. It differs toto cwlo from the rhetorical and senti- 
mental anti-Darwinian diatribes which pass current in the 
pulpit, on the platforms of young mens’ institutes, and in com- 
mercial rooms, and which consists in little more than appeals to 
vulgar prejudice by a speaker whose tongue runs the more 
freely the less he knows of his subject. 
Mr. Mivart has produced a work which may be read with 
pleasure and instruction by any person of decent education, and 
which at the same time will prove suggestive to the few who 
make the philosophy of organic life their special study. 
It is an able monograph of the frog, and something more. It 
throws valuable cross-lights over wide portions of animated 
nature. Would that such works were more plentiful. 
A Glossary of Fossil Mammalia. By J. E. Gore, Assoc. Inst. 
C.E. Roorkee: Thomason College Press. 
In this tiny volume of fifty-one pages, the author gives a “list 
of fossil mammals, compiled for the use of students.’”’ The classi- 
