THE MARSIPOBRANCHII. £4 
sequent inquiry has borne this out; so much so, as to 
have rendered it very doubtful if Goette was not mis- 
taken; and, in doing this, it has but the more fully 
confirmed and extended Dohrn’s epoch-making observation 
(except so far as that author would regard the hypo- 
physis as a pair of preoral gill-pouches).* Indeed, Scott 
himself has undoubtedly erred, from failure to sufficiently 
appreciate this absolutely independent origin of the struc- 
ture in question. ; 
All observers are agreed that the pituitary body is a 
vestigial organ, probably inherited from an ancestor un- 
known; and the facts of development to-day recorded, 
while leaving little room for doubting its primary inde- 
pendence of both mouth and nose, show that whereas 
in all the higher gnathostomata it is carried down with 
the stomodeal involution, perforating the basis cranii 
from beneath, in the Marsipobranchu it is carried up with 
the olfactory apparatus, perforating the cranium from 
above. This consideration is in no way effected by any 
possibilities concerning the homologies and original 
functions of the organ. In view of the admitted impor- 
tance of that, it testifies, to my mind, to an enormity in 
the gap between the Marsipobranchu and the remaining 
higher vertebrata, which even Balfour’s conclusion} that 
the former are “‘ the remnants of a primitive group,” and 
Heeckel’s famous aphorisin{ that ‘‘they are further re- 
moved from the fishes than are the fishes from man” 
insufficiently express.§ It disposes of attempts to prove 
that ‘“‘connecting links”’ between the Marsipobranchii 
* Naples Mittheilungen. Bd. III, p. 264. 
+ Comp. Embryology. Vol. II, p. 69. 
+ ‘‘ Anthropogenie,” p. 425. 
§ It finds its nearest expression hitherto formulated in Heeckel’s subdivision 
of the gnathostomata into Monorhina (Marsipobranchii) and Amphirhina. 
