LINNEAN SOCIEir OF LONDON. Ixxxi 



have occasion to allude to such mention of them as I find in theae 

 pages. 



Britain. 



The unpai'alleled success of our Zoological Society under the active 

 and able management of their present Secretary, the efficient and, I 

 trust, ever-increasing support that our own Society has met with of 

 late years, the Societies established for the promotion of Entomology 

 and other branches of our Science, and the number of Scientific and 

 other Institutions in Edinburgh and Dublin, as well as in various 

 provincial towns which more or less cultivate or encourage Natural 

 Science, have given an impulse to its study which leaves us by no 

 means behind any continental state in the number and importance 

 of our biological publications, nor yet in the excellence of some of 

 our illustrations, although in other cases, owing in a great measure 

 to the high remuneration necessary to secure anything like high art, 

 wc may miss that neatness of execution which gives to some of the 

 German and French biological plates such clearness and precision of 

 detail in a small compass. I trust, however, that we are now giving 

 up those exaggerated analyses upon too gigantic a scale to be readily 

 caught by the eye, which were prevalent some ten or twenty years 

 back, without recurring to the small uninstructive ones of former 

 days; and some of the most recent zoological illustrations may really 

 be cited as models of art. 



It would be useless on the present occasion to do more than men- 

 tion by name the principal works and papers on systematic and struc- 

 tural Zoology which have appeared in this country within the last 

 two years. Such are : — Mr, W. K. Parker's Treatise on the Shoulder- 

 girdle and Sternum in the Vertebrata, and his Memoir in the Phi- 

 losophical Transactions on the Structure and Development of the 

 Skull in the Ostrich Tribe ; Mr. St. G. Mivart's paper in our Trans- 

 actions oil the Anatomy of Echidna Hystrix y Professor Owen's Me- 

 moir on the Skeletal Characters of the Dodo; Professor Huxley's 

 New System of Classification of Birds, proposed in the Proceedings 

 of the Zoological Society ; Dr. J. E. Gray's Synopses of various Pami- 

 lies, in the same Proceedings, and in the Annals of Natural Histoiy, 

 especially Bats, Squirrels, and Eared Seals ; tlie sixth and seventh 

 volumes of Dr. Giinther's Catalogue of Fishes, bringing the classifi- 

 cation down to the end of the order Physostomi, and the splendid 

 work which the same distinguished ichthyologist has brought out, 

 in conjunction with Col. Playfair, under the auspices of the Bombay 



