REVIEWS. 109 
cated with new ideas, and painted what they saw in fantastic and 
impossible shapes; even in later times there is much that is 
apparently if not really fanciful in the views of the great English 
anatomist, whose archetype skeleton made each man a “ potential 
Briareus as to limbs,” and it is doubtless true that other cultiva- 
tors of this field of anatomy have become so entangled in the com- 
plicated machinery of their own devising, as to see in the fruitful 
soil only stones to be cast out, stumps to be uprooted and streams 
of error to be turned from their channels; all of them facts, for 
which “so much the worse if they do not accord with my theory.” 
But the last ten years have brought new laborers into the har- 
vest ; crude anatomical speculations have been gradually corrected 
by the severe criteria of embryology, and such men as Gegenbauer 
in Germany, Cleland and Flower, Huxley and Humphrey, Mivart 
and Parker* in England, are carefully reviewing all previous 
works and sifting the grains of truth from the Okenian chaff. In- 
deed, the science of homologies now fills more or less space in 
every anatomical periodical, and here in America we are encour- 
aged to this kind of research not only by the general bearing of 
the works of Agassiz, Dana, and Wyman, but in particular by the 
paper on ‘‘ Symmetry and Homology,” above named. 
In his second paper, Dr. Coues considers the symmetrical 
homology of the bones of the limbs and adopts the determinations 
of Prof. Wyman with queries respecting the correspondence of the 
Shoulder and pelvic girdles; a subject which now demands careful 
revision in the light of Parker’s splendid monograph.¢ The most 
important of these determinations is one upon which, in fact, the 
whole matter rests, or which rather expresses the result of the en- 
tire investigation, viz.: that the little finger (minimus) is the 
symmetrical homologue of the great toe (hallux or protos), on 
the ground of their relative position upon the inner borders of 
hand and foot respectively, when the former is supinated and 
brought into its more normal position. 
That this is the true morphological way of comparing the hand 
and the foot, and that the difference in the numerical composition 
of the thumb and little toe would be of very little morphological 
Consequence; even were it constant in the vertebrates, was first, so 
Ree ee ee 
*The late Prof. Goodsir 
t Structure and evelopment of the aderi and Sternum. W. Kitchen Par- 
P. Ray Societ: 
