Proceedings of the A. A. A. S. 51*7 



and had some amount of memory. Another observer was 

 quoted as authority for an instance of remarkable reasoning 

 power on the part of a hornet that had captured a locust 

 under difficult circumstances, but managed by much in- 

 genuity to fly off with its victim in triumph. The general 

 deduction was that insects were not to be considered as 

 automata acting by instinct, but reasoning creatures, having 

 likes and dislikes of their own, and solving problems pre- 

 sented to them by the exercise of intellectual faculties. He 

 continued his defence of Darwinianism by stating that the 

 missing links which the public so hungrily demanded were 

 being found on every hand. He quoted the emphatic words 

 of Professor Cope, uttered in 1874, and said that in his 

 magnificent collection at Philadelphia he had many fossils 

 that were clearly intermediate. Some brachiopods were 

 singularly favorable specimens, and some gasteropods were 

 nearly equally so. Dr. Putnam and Dr. Scudder were 

 brought forward as authorities for the interesting fact that 

 insects in the palreozoic age were intermediate in some 

 features, particularly their eyes. 



Since 1876 Professor Marsh and Professor Cope had pub- 

 lished remarkable works upon extinct vertebrate life. Pro- 

 fessor Marsh demonstrated that the brains of early mammals 

 were remarkably small, in spite of the huge size of their 

 owners. It was not strange that they were succeeded after 

 the next geologic age by smaller animals with larger brains. 

 The Dinocerta were typical creatures for their bulk and 

 smallness of brain, and it might well be that they were too 

 sluggish and too stupid to protect their offspring. Professor 

 John Fiske had advanced a similar argument with regard 

 to the disappearance in toto of the early races of mankind. 

 Another observer had pointed out the reptilian character 

 of the Monotremata of Australia, obviously a class of interme- 

 diate creatures that had survived from a prior geologic age, 

 and were anachronisms to-day. 



The speaker's next statement was concerning a creature 

 with a rudimentary third eye; and he observed that no 

 sooner had Dr. Thomas Dwight, in his attack upon Dar- 

 winism, limited possible vision in vertebrates to two eyes, 



