1870.] Notices of Scientific Works. 367 



pods, Amphiopods, and many others ; so that by being thus grouped 

 around one central and familiar figure, the resemblances and differ- 

 ences can be better appreciated and more easily remembered. 



In the third part are twelve plates containing drawings of nine 

 dissections of common animals, executed from the dissections them- 

 selves, by Mr. (j. Crozier, formerly draughtsman to the Kadcliffe 

 Library, Oxford ; and sixteen diagrams taken from the best sources. 

 In the descriptions, which serve as comments on these figures, there 

 is necessarily at times some amount of repetition of what has been 

 gone over in the previous part. Nobody, however, who knows how 

 much the impressions of facts upon the mind are deepened by their 

 being presented in different manners, will regret this. The facts 

 of anatomy, as every teacher or learner of it knows, have to be re- 

 iterated many times before they become retained. 



A certain amount of preliminary knowledge is necessary before 

 this book, or indeed before any book on comparative anatomy, can 

 be beneficially studied. It is not much. One session's steady work 

 will give any average student a fair knowledge of human osteology 

 and visceral anatomy, and then he will be prepared to enter with 

 advantage on such a study of comparative anatomy as Professor 

 Kolleston has here so admirably sketched out for him. 



OTHEE WOKLDS THAN OUKS.* 



The first sentiment of a thoughtful man untrammelled by the in- 

 fluences of doctrinal theology, when he hears the question, " Are the 

 celestial spheres intended as the abode of life ?" is one of profound 

 astonishment. The more natural inquiry, it seems to him, would 

 be, " Why should the other worlds not be the seats of living organ- 

 isms ?" and the very question reminds him at once of the littleness 

 of his race, and of the restricted mental capacity which can seriously 

 entertain such a doubt. Imagine a colony of ants, who have 

 raised, what appears to them, a vast monument of their enterprise 

 and industry in the shape of a little mound, upon some islet in a 

 vast lake ; and conceive of the complacency with which the ant- 

 philosophers will gaze upon the neighbouring islets, from which 

 they are separated by an impassable barrier, and of their grave 

 deliberations as to whether those other vast regions are peopled with 

 beings like themselves, or what can have been the object Nature had 

 in view when she raised up other lands besides their own ? This is 

 precisely the position of our philosophers who cling to the idea that 



* 'Other Worlds than Ours: the Plurality of Worlds studied under the 

 Light of Kecent Scientific Researches.' By Richard A. Proctor, B.A., F.R.A.S, 

 Longmans, Green, & Co. 



