454 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVIII. No. 718 



ment of Gymnarchus (the first of the Mor- 

 myridse to be made known embryologically) 

 by Richard Assheton; and shorter articles by 

 Mr. Boulenger on the fishes of the Gambia, 

 by Dr. Bles on the development of the Anura; 

 and one by Mr. Browne on a fresh-water 

 medusa, discovered by Budgett in the delta of 

 the Niger, that seems to be identical with the 

 Limnocnida found in Lake Tanganyika. It 

 is impossible here to review the results of 

 these works in detail, but a special word should 

 be spoken in commendation of the excellence, 

 and often the truly artistic quality, of the 

 illustrations, many of which are from Bud- 

 gett's own drawings. 



Budgett showed a rare union of technical 

 skill and morphological insight in laboratory 

 research with uncommon abilities as a field 

 naturalist. His diaries reveal a true lover of 

 nature, one having a wide range of interests 

 in living things, alertly awake to natural 

 beauty, and steadfastly unsparing of himself 

 in the pursuit of his special aim. His was not 

 the only life to be sacrificed in the pursuit of 

 the Polypterus development. Nathan E. Har- 

 rington died at Atbara in the simimer of 1899 

 while leading an expedition sent out from 

 Columbia University on the same quest. The 

 results attained through Budgett's success are 

 of great and permanent value to science, but 

 they have cost a heavy price. 



W. 



A Popular History of Astronomy during the 



Nineteenth Century. By Agnes M. Oleeke. 



New York, The Macmillan Company. 1908. 



Pp. vi -f 489. $2.75 net. 



This is a reprint, without change, of the 

 fourth edition, which appeared in 1902 and 

 was widely reviewed at that time. This well- 

 knovsTi work is accurate, lucid and interesting. 

 It is already on the shelves of every astron- 

 omer's library, but should more universally be 

 found in school and circulating libraries. 



It is to be regretted that the few errors and 

 omissions which are to be found in the fourth 

 edition were not corrected in this reprint. 

 Failure in this respect is doubtless due to the 

 lamented death of the author in 1907. The 

 publishers, however, should have had made 



such obvious and easy corrections as the 

 change in the date of the death of Lassell from 

 1818 to 1880 (p. 83), and the substitution of 

 the word " gemination " for " germination " 

 when describing the canals of Mars (p. 279), 

 and should have supplied in Table V. the 

 missing but easily obtainable data regarding 

 focal lengths of various telescopes listed 

 therein. 



Storks B. Barrett 



SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS AND ARTICLES 



The July number (volume 9, number 3) of 

 the Transactions of the American Mathe- 

 matical Society contains the following papers : 



W. H. EoEVEB : " Brilliant points of curves and 

 surfaces." 



Oswald Veblen : " Continuous increasing func- 

 tions of iinite and transfinite ordinals." 



E. J. WlLCZTNSKi : " Projective differential 

 geometry of curved surfaces (third memoir)." 



A. L. TjNDEEHni : " Invariants of the function 

 F{x, y, x', y') in the calculus of variations." 



E,. G. D. RicHAEDSON : " The integration of a 

 sequence of functions and its application to iter- 

 ated integrals." 



SPECIAL ARTICLES 



DEGENERATION, ALBINISM AND ESfBEEEDING 



In a paper before the American Philo- 

 sophical Society last spring I showed that 

 often when the two parents have any organ or 

 quality A in two conditions, A + and A — , 

 of which the former is a highly developed or 

 progressive condition, the latter a poorly de- 

 veloped or even absent condition, the former 

 condition wiU regularly dominate over the 

 latter. In the particular case of human hair 

 color we find, for example, that children are 

 not ordinarily darker than their darker par- 

 ent. Consequently, if both parents have 

 flaxen hair the children will have hair of the 

 same sort. Prom this principle, applied 

 generally, it follows that when both parents 

 have an organ in a low condition of develop- 

 ment it will be so also in all of their children. 

 This principle explains the persisting or in- 

 creasing degeneration in the descendants of 

 two degenerate parents. 



When one parent has an organ in a minus 



