258 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. V. No. 111. 



the Isle of Wight, where earth-tremors ap- 

 pear to be of constant occurrence, and 

 stated that he had been able to feel 

 certain tremors at a distance of several 

 thousands of miles. Indeed, he went fur- 

 ther and, calculating that one shock had 

 reached his instruments from a distance of 

 not less than 6,000 miles, he stated the ex- 

 treme probability that a shock had occurred 

 in Japan on August 31st, a prediction 

 which was verified at the close of the meet- 

 ing. 



The Coral Reef Committee had to an- 

 nounce that so far as the boring at Funa- 

 futi went it was practically a failure, but 

 that the results brought back by the scien- 

 tific ofi&cers of the ship and by the three 

 naturalists engaged in the investigation, 

 were of very great importance from the 

 points of view of anthropology, zoology, 

 botany, geology and hydrography. The Ge- 

 ological Photographs Committee reported 

 that a large part of Britain was now pho- 

 tographically registered in the collection of 

 1,400 prints which had been amassed, but 

 there were many areas ill-represented and 

 others almost as yet untouched. In con- 

 clusion, a discovery by Prof. Busz must not 

 be omitted. Amongst some remarkable 

 rocks produced by contact metamorphism 

 round the Dartmoor granite mass he had 

 found and isolated corundum iu a felsite 

 which had enclosed and metamorphosed a 

 fragment of slate. 



W. "W. Watts. 

 London. 



BELATIONS OF TAR8IU8 TO THE LE3IURS 

 AND APES. 

 The systematic position of the Lemu- 

 roidea has for j^ears puzzled the most emi- 

 nent naturalists. The French zoologists, 

 including Alphonse Milne-Edwards, Gervais 

 and Filhol, consider the Lemurs as occupying 

 a position entirely apart from the Apes, and 

 moreover some of these observers find in 

 the anatomy of the soft parts of the Lemurs 



close resemblances structurally to the same 

 parts in the Ungulates. The conclusions 

 of Filhol in regard to the position of the 

 fossil Lemurs have not been generally ac- 

 cepted by paleontologists, and there is no 

 doubt that certain characters of the denti- 

 tion of Adapts which are like those of the 

 perissodactyle Ungulates must be consid- 

 ered as cases of parallelism. 



Years ago Mivart ably contended for the 

 close affinity between the Apes and Lemurs, 

 and Cope saw in Anaptomorphus the most 

 simian lemur yet discovered. Schlosser, on 

 paleontological grounds, derives the An- 

 thropoids and Lemuroids from the same 

 stem form. 



Up to the present time the genus Tardus 

 has been considered to be a member of the 

 Lemuroidea, but the recent investigations 

 of Hubrecht on the placentation of Tarsius 

 go to show that this genus has the same 

 type of placenta as in the Apes. Accord- 

 ingly Hubrecht would transfer Tarsius from 

 the Lemuroid to the Anthropoid division 

 of the Primates. In this removal of 

 Tarsius to the Anthropoids, he proposes to 

 include Anaptomorphus, and if the latter 

 genus is placed among the Apes, why not 

 place Necrolemur there too, as it has prob- 

 ably the same dental formula as Tarsius, 

 and the modification of the anterior part of 

 the dentition in Necrolenmr resembles that 

 of Tarsius. 



It appears to me if this change in the 

 classification of the Primates takes place 

 we shall be little benefited and that it will 

 be exceedingly difficult to discover any 

 characters of the skeleton by which we can 

 separate the Apes from the Lemurs. I hold 

 that the summation of the osteological char- 

 acters of Tarsius brings this form nearer 

 the Lemurs than the Apes, and, moreover, I 

 know of only one Anthropoid character in 

 the skeleton of Tarsius; this is the partial 

 closure inferiorly of the orbital fossa, by a 

 lamina of bone extending from the alisphe- 



