
1890.] Zoology. 85 
ferrets, etc., and to destroy only the does taken, setting the males free. 
‘¢ The results of this mode of operation are that the male rabbits, as 
soon as they begin to predominate in numbers, persecute the females 
with their attentions, and prevent them from breeding. They also kill 
the young rabbits that happen to be born, and where they largely pre- 
dominate in numbers, worry the remaining does to death.’’ Mr. 
Rodier states that on his station an eight months’ trial has resulted in 
clearing the country of the pests. 
Fishes.—Jenkins and Evermann describe (Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus., 
1888) eighteen new species of fishes from Guaymas, on the Gulf of 
California. Hermosilla is a new genus of the family Sparide, and 
Pseuddoblennius of the family Blenniidz. Clevelandia is reduced to 
synonymy as was done some time ago in this Journal. 
Dr. R. W. Shufeldt (Jour. Morphology, II., pt. 2) has given some 
details of the osteology of an unique specimen of the fish Grammico- 
lepis brachiusculus Poey. ‘The account is too detailed for abstract, but 
with Professor Poey, Dr. Shufeldt thinks the relationships of the Gram- 
molepidz tend mostly in the direction of the Casangide. 
Birds.—Mr. F. E. Beddard concludes (Proc. Zoél. Soc., London), 
from a study of the muscular system of Polyboroidei, that this genus 
is not even an aberrant type of Falconidz, and does not deserve even 
sub-family r. 
EMBRYOLOGY. 
A Physiological Hypothesis of Heredity and Variation. 
—The extravagant claims made by Prof. Weismann, the author of the 
doctrine of the isolation of the germ-plasma, and of the doctrine of 
heredity based upon it, as well as the strenuousness with which it is 
insisted that there is no other way in which the facts of inheritance 
may be codrdinated, requires that a re-examination be made of the 
grounds upon which those claims are supposed to rest. This is all the 
more necessary, in that this author and his followers repudiate the evi- 
dence upon which the claim is made that acquired characters, taken 
in the widest Lamarckian sense, can be transmitted. During a period 
extending over fifteen years the present writer has devoted himself to 
a study of the genesis of adaptations, and with the lapse of time the 
conviction has grown only the clearer that these authors are laboring 
