NATURE 



621 



THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1904. 



HALLER'S COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. 

 Lehrbuch der vergleichendcn Anatomie. By B. Hallcr. 

 Pp. viii + 914. Erste Lief., pp. vi + 424, price 8 

 marks; Zweite Lief., pp. viii + 425 to 914, price 12 

 marlis; illustrated. (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1904.) 



IN his preface the author explains that his aim in 

 writing this book was to produce a modern work 

 on the lines of the second or last edition of Gegen- 

 baur's " Grundriss der vergleichenden Anatomie," 

 which was published twenty-four years ago. The 

 book deals in a concise manner with the structure 

 of all animals from the Protozoa to the highest Verte- 

 brata. The character and mode of treatment of the 

 subject will be sufficiently described by the statement 

 that the author closely follows in Gegenbaur's foot- 

 steps. For his material he has drawn very largely 

 from Gegenbaur's recent " Vergleichende .\natomie 

 der Wirbelthiere " (1898 and 1901); but as he devotes 

 much more space — almost half the book — to the In- 

 vertebrata than is given to this branch of the subject 

 in the latter work, he has freely used the facts and 

 illustrations found in the great treatises of .A. Lang 

 and Korschelt and Heider in compiling the first part. 



The whole book, with the e.\ception of the part 

 dealing with the structure of the brain of vertebrates, 

 concerning which the author has published some 

 original memoirs (" Morphologisches Jahrbuch," 1898 

 and 1900), is obviously a compilation, and not from the 

 original writings, but from such books (themselves of 

 necessity largely compilations) as have already been 

 mentioned. The result is what one would naturally 

 e.\pect. The book reproduces many of the mistakes 

 iif the works from which it is derived, and adds not 

 .1 few misinterpretations which do not occur in these ; 

 the information is not up to date. The author is, for 

 example, unaware of J. P. Hill's discovery of a placenta 

 in the Marsupialia, and is apparently ignorant of 

 Willey's work on Balanoglossus ; the descriptions are 

 disjointed and difficult to understand, such as would be 

 written by one who has no adequate practical acquaint- 

 ance with the facts, or has not digested the mass of 

 pabulum with which he is dealing. Anyone who has 

 had occasion to make use of the last edition of Gegen- 

 baur's " Vergleichende Anatomie " knows to how 

 great a degree this work fails to reach the high level 

 of the first edition, which was written when the author 

 was in his prime. In the last edition Gegenbaur relied 

 in loo many cases upon the immature work of voung 

 contributors to the " Morphologisches Jahrbuch " in 

 preference to more trustworthy researches published 

 elsewhere. MX such faults are reproduced in Haller's 

 book. 



The attempt to cover so vast a field as the entire 

 animal kingdom is such a colossal undertaking in the 

 present state of knowledge that one hesitates before 

 hastily passing judgment on the work as a whole. In 

 such circumstances the reviewer naturally turns for an 

 estimate to those parts of the book in which the author 

 might claim to write as an expert. The portion deal- 

 NO. 1826, VOL. 70] 



ing with the brain of the Vcrtebrata is almost entirely 

 original. 



The difficulty of understanding the author's mean- 

 ing which characterises the greater part of the book 

 is greatly increased in the case of the nervous system 

 by his frequent abuse of terms and the needless inven- 

 tion of new names for structures which already have 

 designations familiar to all anatomists. But, in 

 addition, his account of the brain is so studded with 

 inaccuracies that the mere enumeration of them would 

 fill the whole space devoted to this review. It is 

 sufficient to quote only a few from among many others 

 equally astounding. While he correctly locates the 

 caudal limit of the forebrain on the dorsal side at the 

 posterior commissure, he places it on the ventral side 

 at the junction between the mid- and hind-brain, which 

 he calls " sulcus interencephalicus " (p. 623 and else- 

 where). In reptiles, birds, and mammals he calls the 

 paraterminal body (which in mammals becomes con- 

 verted into the septum lucidum and the precommissural 

 area) by the name " gyrus fornicatus " — a term which 

 is employed by all other anatomists to designate a 

 strip of neopallium above the corpus callosum (pp. 633 

 and 638 inter alia). To add to the confusion, he labels 

 the fascia dentata in a marsupial brain " gyrus 

 fornicatus " (p. 640). In figures of the brains of 

 reptiles, birds, and a mammal (rabbit), he labels as 

 " sulcus coronarius " furrows which are certainly not 

 homologous the one with the other ; and even in the 

 mammal it is not the " coronary " but the " lateral " 

 sulcus on which he has placed the label. On p. 638 he 

 refers to the hippocampus as " part of the occipital 

 lobe," and on the preceding page he states that the 

 occipital lobe is separated from the frontal lobe in 

 Echidna by the Sylvian fissure ; by the latter term he 

 refers to a furrow (/), Fig. 629), which resembles the 

 Sylvian fissure neither in form nor in position. But the 

 most erroneous and hopelessly muddled parts of his 

 account of the brain are his numerous references to the 

 cerebral commissures. He seems to imagine that the 

 " fimbria " and " fornix " (names applied bv 

 anatomists to different parts of the same series of 

 hippocampal fibres) are independent structures, and he 

 refers to the fornix-commissure by the term " fimbria- 

 commissure," and applies the former term in one place 

 to a part of the anterior commissure, which has no 

 connection whatever with the fornix, and in another 

 place to the corpus callosum ! To this amazing con- 

 fusion he adds the further error of attributing to 

 Phascolomys a corpus callosum like that of Erinaceus, 

 and representing an utterly different state of affairs in 

 Didelphys, whereas all marsupials lack a true corpus 

 callosum. 



His spelling of many terms is somewhat peculiar. 

 .\s examples I might quote " thalamocephalon " (p. 

 636), " rhinocephalon " (p. 638), " t/jela " (p. 637), and 

 " corpus callosj " (in several places). 



If we judge the whole work by the part to which 

 the author has devoted his chief attention no con- 

 demnation of it can be considered too harsh. It is 

 confused, inaccurate, and difficult to understand. 



The book has one great redeeming feature in its 

 numerous illustrations. They are, on the whole, well 



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