1870. | Recent Literature. 775 
ment of the whole, but all unitedly produced as the resultant of 
the codperation of the individual powers of nature.” 
t is easy for the Austrian professor to give utterance to this 
dogma, but in the present state of our knowledge we doubt 
whether such a broad generalization (or narrow conclusion) can 
be supported by demonstrable facts, and we would urge that, as 
in human history so in that of the lower animal world, individual 
effort is all important; the success of certain favored individuals 
effecting and insuring a progress that ultimately dominates the 
whole mass of organized beings. 
The instances which the author gives of the losses from insect 
depredations are of a mild order compared with those sustained 
in the United States, but on the whole the subject is treated ina 
comprehensive and interesting way. The illustrations of this 
part, though sometimes too diminutive and not always carefully 
engraved, are perhaps sufficiently clear for a popular work. 
The last part is devoted to the embryology and metamorphoses 
of insects, and forms a fresh, well illustrated and most convenient 
treatise on the subject. The works of Weismann, Kowalevaky 
the work a standard one for some years to come. Among the 
illustrations of hitherto unpublished embryological facts are cross 
sections of the embryo of the flesh fly, of the Zina populi beetle, 
the two diagrammatic drawings of the germ and its embryona 
layers ; of the embryo of Mantis, and the eggs of the swarm-moth 
(Liparis dispar). The author has attempted to combine the 
s 
reader, but the matter, some of which is new, and the valuable 
and original figures of the longitudinal section of the puparium 
and enclosed pupa of a muscid fly, the section through the thorax 
of a Polistes wasp, through the head of a caterpillar, and through 
the thorax of the cabbage-butterfly are original and valuable. — 
(Note x.iv of the Leyden Museum. Svo, pp. 193-232.) Fromthe author, > 
<2 Darei d other Essays. By John Fiske, M.A., LL.B., etc. 8vo, cloth, pp. 
-~ 283. Macmillan & Co., London and New York, 1879. ee ee 
