758 Proceedings of Scientific Societies. [ October, 
tion B, was entitled, “ Palaontological and Embryological Devel- 
opment.” The speaker referred to the remarkable parallelism 
between the embryonic development of the members of a group 
and its palzontological history. This parallelism, which has been 
on the one side a strong argument in favor of design in the plan 
of creation, is now, with slight emendations, doing duty on the 
other as a newly discovered article of faith in the new biology. 
As a demonstration of the truth of such a parallelism, he pre- 
‘sented a series of facts and generalizations resulting from his 
studies of the fossil and recent sea-urchins. In closing he 
insisted on the impossibility of tracing in the paleontological 
succession of the Echini anything like a sequence of genera. “N 
direct filiation can be shown to exist, and yet the very existence 
of persistent types, not only among Echinoderms, but in every 
group of marine animals, genera which have continued to exist 
without interruption from the earliest epochs at which they occur 
to the present day, would prove conclusively that at any rate 
some groups among the marine animals of the present day are 
the direct descendants of those of the earliest geological periods. 
When we come to types which have not continued as long, but 
yet which have extended through two or three great periods, we 
must likewise accord to theis ene representatives a direct 
descent from the older.” * “ Such descent we can trace, 
and trace as confidently as we trace a part of the population of 
orth America of to-day as the descendants of some portion of 
the population of the beginning of this century. But we can go 
no further with confidence, and bold indeed would he be who 
would attempt even in a single State to trace the genealogy of 
the inhabitants from those of ten years before. We had better 
acknowledge our inability to go beyond a certain point; anything 
beyond the general parallelism I have attempted to trace ‘which 
in no way invalidates the other proposition, we must recognize as 
hopeless.” 
Prof. A. M. Mayer read an eulogy on the late Prof. Joseph 
Henry. The botanists were entertained at the Botanic Garden 
by Prof. Asa Gray, who read an essay on the vegetation of the 
Rocky mountains. Prof. A. Hyatt also gave an evening lecture 
on the Laat aetna of Planorbis as an illustration of the doc- 
trine of evolutio 
The leme officers were elected for the next year, the meet- 
ing to be held at Cincinnati: president, Prof. G. J. Brush, of New 
Haven; secretary, Prof. C. V. Riley, of Washington ; treasurer, 
St. Louie? Soca. Prof. William Ete of Can 
Following are the titles of papers read in sects yi natural 
-history and geology: 
