82 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LII. No. 1334 



catch of 27,821 skins taken in 1919, the total 

 gross revenue for the lot would be $3,922,204.58. 



In view of the feverishly advancing prices of 

 all kinds of real fur, the growing scarcity of 

 the supply, and the clamorously insistent de- 

 mands, both of the rich and the poor, there are 

 good grounds for the belief that very soon we 

 will see good raw fur-seal skins selling at auc- 

 tion at an average price of $250 each. With 

 110,000,000 people in America demanding 

 "fur," the future of the trade in real fur is 

 remarkably bright — so long as the supply lasts 

 — and Congress may regard the future of the 

 nation's fur seal industry with entire com- 

 placency. The saving of the fur seal herds was 

 a good investment. 



In the future, when all other bearers of 

 good fur have been utterly exterminated — as 

 they soon will he — the protected fur seal 

 herds will produce, by sure-and-certain arith- 

 metical progression, a really vast quantity of 

 the finest fur in the world. It needs no 

 stretch of prophecy to foretell the annual in- 

 crement to the three nations who now are so 

 sensibly preserving the fur seals of Alaska 

 from killing at sea. When we begin to take, as 

 we formerly did in the days of the fur seal 

 millions, an annual catch of 100,000 skins, 

 the importance of the salvaged fur-seal herd 

 will be realized. If we figure it out on a 

 basis of the sale of February 2, 1920 at St. 

 Louis, the answer is $14,098,000 per year, 15 

 per cent, of which will belong to the United 

 States. 



Under the terms of our treaty with Eng- 

 land and Japan we are dividing net proceeds 

 with those two partner nations, who now help 

 us to preserve the fur seals when at sea, on 

 the perfectly fair basis of 15 per cent, to 

 Japan, and 10 per cent, to England. During 

 the five-year closed season we annually paid 

 to each of those two nations the sum of 

 $10,000. 



In its habits the fur seal — which in reality 

 is not at all a true seal, but a fur-coated sea- 

 lion — is one of the most remarkable of all 

 sea-going mammals. There are writers who 

 still insist that fur seals can be managed by 

 man just as a farmer manages his herds of 



breeding cattle and horses. As a matter of 

 fact, the fur seal is hopelessly wild and un- 

 tamable, and the only "management" that 

 man can bestow upon the free animal is in 

 terms of slaughter. He can drive it and kill 

 it by artificial or by natural selection, but 

 that is absolutely all. The fur seal migrates, 

 returns, breeds and feeds solely in accordance 

 with its own erratic and persistent will, and 

 man's so-called " management " lies solely in 

 the use of the seal-kiUer's club and the skin- 

 ning-knife. 



WiLLUM T. HORNADAY 



New York 



side-to-side versus end-to-end conjuga- 

 tion of chromosomes in relation 

 to crossing over 



The stonefly, Perla immarginata Say, is 

 exceptionally fitted for chromosome studies as 

 it has only five pairs (including the X-Y 

 pair) of chromosomes, each pair of which is 

 structurally differentiated from all others. 

 My observation on this form made in 1917-18 

 forced me to the conclusion that in the pro- 

 phase of the first spermatocytic division 

 " homologous chromosomes are connected to 

 each other telosynaptically in the spireme," 

 and later " they bend toward each other at the 

 synaptic point and become reunited para- 

 synaptically before metaphase." These con- 

 clusions are in agreement with a limited ■ 

 number of workers but are so opposed to the 

 general contention of the majority of cytolo- 

 gists to-day that it was considered then un- 

 profitable to do anything more than describe 

 the process as observed. This was done 

 in my previous paper in the Journal of 

 Morphology, ''^ in which no attempt was made 

 at theoretical discussion in relation to certain 

 genetical evidences. 



As so convincingly summarized in Morgan's 

 recent book,^ Mendel's original law — the segr©- 



1 Nakahara, W., ' ' A Study on the Chromosomes 

 in the Spermatogenesis of the Stonefly, Perla im- 

 marginata Say, with Special Eeference to the 

 Question of Synapsis, Jour. Morphol., Vol. 32, 

 1919. 



a Morgan, T. H., ' ' The Physical Basis of He- 

 redity," 1920. 



