142 Chronicles of Seie [Jan., 



^ToEPHOLOGY. 



CucJ:c''s Ep-?, — P:-::es?:r Aifre:! Newton, of Cambridge, in a 

 recent number of ' Nature ' advocates and endeavours to explain 

 Baldamus ; views with regard to the egga of the cuckoo. Baklanius 

 maintained that the popular assertion ('popular where ?) that the 

 cuckoo lays an egg which varies somewhat in colour according to 

 the nest in which it is deposited, — being modified according to the 

 case, so as to imitate the appearance of the eggs belonging to 

 the nest — is right. This, Professor Newton accepts as a fact, having 

 seen Dr. Baldamus' specimens, and he endeavours to explain this 

 modification of the egg which must otherwise be supposed to be a 

 voluntary act of the bird, by an appeal to the Darwinian theory. 



Professor Newton supposes that of a number of eggs laid by 

 cuckoos in the nests of a given species of bird, those eggs would be 

 most likely to come to maturity which, easterns paribus, had the 

 strongest resemblance to the egg of the given species. He further 

 supposes that the offspring would inherit a tendency to lay in the 

 nest of the same species which its parent had imposed upon, and 

 thus there would be established a race of cuckoos infesting the 

 nest of species A, another race infesting B, and so on. each of which 

 races must tend : : closely more and more the ee.es of the 



infested species. Mr. Sterland objects to this, that in England no 

 such variety in cuckoos' eggs as that described by Baldamus is seen, 

 and that the hedge-sparrow's blue eggs are those most commonly 

 associated with the utterly different speckled eggs of the cuckoo. 

 He also maintains that the supposed separate races of cuckoo would 

 not be able to keep unmixed, that they must get interbred, but he 

 forgets that the females could only be crossed by males, who may 

 be unable to transmit or affect peculiarities belonging to the females 

 who were their progenitors or happen to be their consorts. 



The Kinship of the Vertebrates and the Asjidian MoUi scs. — 

 Eowalevsky, a Russian observer, has made some investigations into 

 the development of Ascidians, which are likely to excite more atten- 

 tion than anything of the kind has for years past. His observations 

 were male two years ago, and were noticed as of importance, first 

 by Ernst Haeckel, of Jena, Darwin's ereat champion and exponent 

 in Germany. Now Professor Emptier, of Kiel, confirms Kowalevsky's 

 statements, and more credence and attention will be daily given to 

 them. It has been long known that the larvae of certain Ascidians, 

 when minute free-sw immin g creatures, have somewhat the aspect 

 of tadpoles, having like them a long swimming tail. This tail 

 has a firm gelatinous rod running along it and projecting into the 

 body of the larva. Now in all vertebrates one of the earliest 

 structures elaborated in the course of development is a long 



