28 



it remains permanently open ; and finally that this view, if 

 confirmed, " will add another feature which justifies Owen, 

 Agassiz and others, in dissenting from Cuvier so far as to 

 give the Selachians a place in the zoological series higher 

 than that of the bony fishes. But at the same time, it will 

 give corroborative proof of the correctness of Cuvier's view, 

 that ' the rudiments of the mamillaries, and intermaxillaries, 

 .... are evident in the skeleton.' " 



In attempting these analyses, I am drifting into a fault 

 which Prof. Wyman never committed, that of being too 

 long. So I must leave many of his papers unmentioned, 

 and barely refer to two 'or three others which cannot be 

 passed over. The most noteworthy of the shorter papers, 

 however, are upon less technical or more generally interest- 

 ing tojrics, so that we have need only to be reminded of 

 them. Among them are his " Observations on the Develop- 

 ment of the Surinam Toad," and the same of "Anableps 

 Gronovii" and the paper " On some unusual Modes of Ges- 

 tation." The importance of these papers lies, not in being 

 accounts of some of the most striking curiosities of the ani- 

 mal world, but in the sngacity and quickness with which he 

 discerned, and the clearness with which he taught, the lessons 

 to be learned from them. Any good zoologist, with the same 

 excellent opportunities, would have worked out all the de- 

 tails of the development of the Surinam toads in the skin of 

 the back of their mother, and would equally have noted the 

 morphological significance of the branchiae and tail, that 

 are never to know any thing of the element they are adapted 

 for ; but Dr. Wyman remarks upon the development of the 

 limbs independently of the vertebral axis, as showing that, 

 whatever view be taken of their homology, they are some- 



