October 31, 1919] 



SCIENCE 



415 



lematic as to the precise processes of its dis- 

 tribution, propagation and life history. But 

 among the present material numerous female 

 specimens occur, a feature not previously de- 

 scribed. Hydroid phases of the organism 

 have been but vaguely suggested.^ 



C. W. Hargitt 

 Sykacdse Untversitt, 

 October 11, 1919 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 



Ohservations on Living Lamellihranchs of 

 New England. By Edward S. Morse. 

 Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., Vol. 35, 

 no. 5, July, 1919, p. 139-196, Figs. 1-48. 

 The state of !N"ew York once published an 

 imposing quarto report on its mollusca of 

 which the only feature remaining in the 

 memory of the present reviewer (except the 

 minus value of that part supposed to cover 

 the nudibranchs) is an exquisite hand-colored 

 engraving, nearly life size, of a common 

 " horse- mussel " shell showing every acciden- 

 tal scratch, every adhering bit of alga or 

 barnacle, every growth line, each abraded 

 spot, a piece of dried mud and a chipped place 

 on the' margin, with more than photographic 

 minute accuracy. It was impressive. It was 

 costly. It was uninspired. It was valueless. 

 Professor Morse's little paper is in every 

 respect the opposite. Its 57 octavo pages and 

 48 rough outline text figures probably cost all 

 together a small fraction of what that gor- 

 geous portrait of a mussel shell alone cost 

 the state of N'ew York. But those pages add 

 more to our knowledge of American molluscs 

 than the entire imposing quarto and each 

 simple drawing is a work of true art. Of 

 some it is not too much to say that, while 

 drawn for the sake of the soft parts alone, 

 and practically confined to outline, they con- 

 stitute the most characteristic extant repre- 

 sentations of the shells. It must have been 

 his years of intensive study of Japanese 

 1 Since the foregoing notes were written I have 

 received later statements from Dr. Payne that he 

 has made several trips to the lake and has under- 

 taken fuller investigations than are at present 

 possible to me, and will doubtless issue them in 

 due time. 



pottery that gave Professor Morse full appre- 

 ciation of the value of subtly correct outlines 

 and the importance of omitting non-essentials, 

 for although his work shows he was already 

 an artist when he first published figures of 

 molluscs fifty-five years ago, and his draw- 

 ings of living brachiopods have been famous 

 for their vital accuracy, it seems to have been 

 reserved for his return to biology after his 

 Japanese interlude, and for the riper age of 

 eighty-one years, for him to attain the acme 

 of the art of telling with his pencil the most, 

 and the most truly, about an animal in the 

 most simple way. 



Although American malacology has, if any- 

 thing rather more fully than European, rec- 

 ognized theoretically that the " soft parts " 

 are, after all, the animal that is being studied, 

 and the shell (except as a paleontologieal 

 marker) of little value except for what it can 

 tell us about that animal, yet in practise it 

 has fallen woefully behind Europe in study 

 of the animal as distinguished from its shell. 

 This is particularly true of the marine 

 PelecjTpods. Pilsbry and others, successors of 

 Binney, have elucidated our land snails, while 

 Baker and Walker have thrown a flood of 

 light on our fresh-water Gasteropoda, and 

 Ortman, Sterki and others under the stim- 

 ulus of Simpson's work on the Naiades have 

 dealt fruitfully with the fresh water Pele- 

 cypoda. The marine Gasteropoda have had 

 more scattered attention but on the whole 

 their bolder habits and more varied and 

 striking anatomy have attracted a consider- 

 able mass of observation, while the shy and 

 rather monotonous animals of the marine 

 Pelecypoda have been neglected. There have 

 been a few intensive studies of single forms 

 by Drew and others; but Dall and Verrill, 

 whose work on this group outbulks many 

 times over that of all others combined, have 

 handled chiefly fossil or deep-sea or preserved 

 material or else " just shells " as usually sent 

 in by the amatetu" collector. Thus a large 

 proportion of the present paper consists of 

 novel observations while the graphic records 

 of those observations are almost wholly novel. 



One could wish that Professor Morse had 



