BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 873 



there lias been from age to age a growth in man's power over 

 nature, which no degrading influences have been able permanently 

 to check.' 



I must not trespass into the province of the botanist, but I should 

 be glad to say that no easier method of learning how the natural 

 history sciences can be made to bear upon the history of man, as a 

 whole, can be devised than that furnished by the perusal of such 

 memoirs as those of lingers upon the plants used for food by man. 

 The very heading and title of the paper I am specially referring to 

 appears to me to have an ambiguity about it which, in itself, is not 

 a little instructive. In that title, ' Botanische Streifziige auf dera 

 Gebiete der Cultur-Geschichte,' the latter word may be taken, I 

 imagine, etymologically at least, to refer either to culture proper, or 

 to floriculture, or to agriculture. At any rate, the paper itself may 

 be read in the Sitzungsberichte of the Vienna Academy for 1859 ; 

 it has, I suppose, superseded the interesting chapters in Link's 

 'Urwelt und Alterthum,' of date 1831; and it is not unlikely, I 

 apprehend, to be itself, in its turn, superseded also. 



Coming, in the third place, to Zoology, I suppose I shall be 

 justified in saying that the largest issue which has been raised in 

 the current year, an issue for the examination of the data for 

 deciding which the two months of July and August which are just 

 past may have furnished persons now present with opportunities, is 

 the question of the kinship of the Ascidians to the Vertebrata. 

 There is or was nothing better established till the appearance of 

 Kowalewsky's paper, now about four years ago, than the existence 

 of a wide gulf between the two great divisions of the animal 

 kingdom, the Vertebrata and the In vertebrata : nothing could 

 be more revolutionary than the views which would obviously rise 

 out of his facts ; and within the present year these facts have been 

 abundantly confirmed by Prof. Kupfer, whose very clearly written 

 and beautifully illustrated paper has just appeared in the current 

 number of Schultze's 'Archiv fiir microscopische Anatomic.' Kupfer's 

 researches have been carried on upon Ascidia canina ; but they more 

 than confirm the accuracy of what Kowalewsky had stated to take 

 place in Ascidia mammillata, and which may be summed up briefly 

 thus :— In the larval Ascidian we have in its caudal appendages an 

 axis skeleton clearly analogous, if not essentially homologous, to the 

 chorda dorsalis of the vertebrate embryo, as consisting, like it, of 



