394 
at Zakro, on the eastern coast of Crete, identified by 
Spratt with the site of Itanos, described by him in 
pp. 121-149 of the ‘‘Annual,” are of great importance, 
not only as giving us much new knowledge of Mycenzean 
house-building, but as throwing light upon the question 
of Mycenzean connections with Libya. The use of 
bricks for the upper courses of house-walls is now proved. 
The bricks were large and flat, the largest measuring 
24 x 16 x 4 inches, and “well and squarely laid” 
(p. 130). In the houses, besides vases; bronze imple- 
ments, &c., was found a large number (nearly 800) of 
clay sealings, bearing impressions of intaglios, three of 
which are figured by Mr. Hogarth (Fig. 45; see Fig. 2 
below), These “Minotaur” types are in the highest 
degree curious. This female figure with a bull’s head ; 
this bull-headed woman with a bird’s wings and tail— 
are they mere fanciful designs, or do they point to the 
veneration of some strange androgynous deity ? 
However late in the Mycenzan age the existing 
remains of the settlement may be placed, ‘‘ these were 
still anterior to the Age of Iron,’ says Mr. Hogarth 
(italics in original)... .‘ Nor were any fragments 
observed of distinctly geometric vases. ... The fact 
that the remains ...come to a clean and abrupt 
finish with” the close of the Bronze Age, “showing 
no admixture of remains of the succeeding epoch, is 
in favour of those who hold that the use of iron and the 
Fic. 2.— Clay Seal. Impression from Zakro. 
inception of the geometric style resulted from some 
violent and radical social change in the 42gean, such as 
‘conquest by a distinct race” (p. 146). Whether this was 
an Achaian or a Dorian conquest, Prof. Ridgeway and 
his critics must settle: personally, we still prefer the 
second alternative. 
The settlement is regarded by Mr. Hogarth as a 
trading outpost of Knossos, and in view of the objects of 
Knossian type discovered, this view seems a _ very 
probable one. 
“Tts position,” he says (p. 147), “indicates that Zakro 
traded with Libya direct, and not (as has been sup- 
posed) by a circuitous route through Rhodes and Cyprus.” 
While still holding to his view that the circuitous 
route, by which we know came the great armament 
which attacked Egypt in Rameses III.’s time, in which it 
is possible that Cretan Axians were included,! was the 
most likely one for primitive navigators to follow, the 
present writer is inclined to think that he has, in “ The 
Oldest Civilization of Greece,” to some extent under- 
estimated the possibility of direct communication in 
Mycenzean times between Crete and Libya. The bay of 
Zakro, remarks Mr. Hogarth (p. 123), ‘Sis the best known 
rendezvous and port of call for the fishing fleets of the 
eastern islands, which sail annually to the sponge- 
grounds off the Libyan shore. . . . For sailing craft the 
bay of Zakro is still the principal station on the road 
from the 42gean to Libya.” 
1 It is true that Axos was an inland town but this was no bar to its 
having taken part in an over-sea expedition: see also Herodotos, iv. 154, 
which should not be forgotten. 
NO. 1712, VOL. 66] 
NATURE 
[ AUGUST 21, 1902 
The argument is a fair one, but we have no certainty 
that Mycenzan sailors were as familiar with the direct 
route to Africa as the modern sponge-fishers. The geo- 
graphical objection to the theory of direct connection, 
which has been stated to be non-existent, is simply the 
absence of any coast leading the primitive voyager from 
Crete to Libya; he would naturally follow the coast 
round, as the later Greeks went from Greece to Sicily, 
and not sail south into an open and unknown sea. 
However this may be, space forbids the further discussion 
of the point here. 
Mr. Hogarth appends a description by Dr. Boyd- 
Dawkins of proto-Mycenzean dolichocephalic skulls found 
by him, which the distinguished craniologist pronounces 
to possess characters which “point unmistakably to the 
fact that the possessors of the skulls . . . led the arti- 
ficial life of highly civilised peoples” (p. 151). These 
skulls are regarded by him as belonging to the long- 
headed Pelasgic or Mediterranean stock of Sergi, which 
is what we should have expected. 
The review of last year’s “Annual” spoke of it as 
“the most important contribution to our knowledge of the 
early history of mankind that has appeared for many 
years” (NATURE, Ixiv. p. 15). It can only be said of 
this year’s number that in interest and importance it 
suffers very little by comparison with No. VI. H. H. 
ALEXANDER KOWALEVSKY. 
HE illustrious Russian embryologist and student of 
the anatomy of lower animal forms, Kowalevsky, 
died, to the great grief of the whole zoological world, 
on November 22, 1901, of an attack of apoplexy. 
Kowalevsky was one of those rare men whose name is 
associated by all his contemporaries with a new departure 
in the branch of science which he cultivated. Albert 
K@lliker, still alive and well, had as long ago as 1844 
followed with his microscope and drawn the division of 
the single cell constituting the egg of the cuttlefish, and 
had traced the process of the formation of the mass of 
embryo-cells by division of the cells resulting from the 
cleavage of the first or primary egg-cell. Remak, in 
1850-58, had traced the evolution of definite tissues from 
the embryonic cells, and later students of the embryo 
chick had followed out the earlier indications of von 
Baer and were busy with the discussion of the origin and 
outcome of the embryonic layers of cells. But Kowalevsky 
went further than this, and in small transparent embryos 
(such as those of Ascidia, Amphioxus, Sagitta and 
Argiope) traced the history of adult organs cell by cell to 
the original egg-cell. It is this procedure which must 
immortalise Kowalevsky. Ten years after his first 
papers were published, the aim which he had given to 
embryological science became the definite and recognised 
purpose of successive generations of embryologists in 
England, Germany and the United States. Before 
Kowalevsky’s work on the development of Amphioxus, 
carried out in 1864-65, and on Ascidia in 1866, zoologists 
were content to regard the cell-masses resulting from the 
first cell-divisions of the animal egg-cell as intricate 
heaps of units which no one could expect to analyse. 
Some way was made in the direction of their compre- 
hension by the application to invertebrate embryos of the 
doctrine of cell-layers, but it was not until the avowed 
purpose of the embryologist became the definite tracing 
of the genesis of the cells of cell-layers one by one from 
pre-existing cells and finally from the first cell-divisions 
of the egg-cell that Kowalevsky’s work bore its full fruit, 
and a thorough-going cellular embryology was estab- 
lished. Much still remains to be done on this basis, 
but we see it clearly foreshadowed in Kowalevsky’s 
great memoirs on the development of Amphioxus and of 
Ascidia, wherein the identity of the nervous system, the 
