920 The American Naturalist. _[November, 
of the organs of the body. Professor Parker has gone over the 
ground covered by my paper on the anatomy and physiology 
of the Dipnoi, and has cleared up some of the things which I 
was unable to carefully study, owing to the fact that the only 
material accessible at that time consisted of store-bought alco- 
holie specimens, intended, without doubt, for museum collec- 
tions. Hence, it not unfrequently happened that questions de- 
pending upon histological detail could not be satisfactorily or 
finally solved. On the other hand, Parker has arrived at some 
conclusions which I think are hardly justified in the present 
state of our knowledge, and it is to these matters that we will 
now confine our attention. In my Freiburg paper I suggested 
that it was hardly permissible to maintain two distinct genera 
of the Dipneumones, and I based my suggestion upon the lack 
of adequate structural differences between the forms commonly 
held to be generically distinct. I proposed on that account to 
use the name Lepidosiren instead of the name Protopterus for 
the African species, and I called attention tothe great scarcity ` 
of the individuals of Lepidosiren paradoxa in museum collec- 
ons. . 
My remarks, and more especially the adoption of the name 
Lepidosiren as the sole genus of the Dipneumones had the effect 
of calling out a reply from the late Professor Anton Schneider, 
of Breslau,’ and also an article by Dr. George Baur, of Chicago 
University. 
Quite recently, Parker publishes his agreement with the 
conclusions of Schneider and Baur as far as the generic dis- 
tinctness of the African form is concerned. It may be of inter- 
est to the uninitiated to know that none of the recent writers 
have ever seen a fragment of a Lepidosiren paradozxa from South 
America, and we all alike depend upon the published accounts 
of this creature’s anatomy by Bischoff, Hyrtl, Klein, and a few 
others, all of whose investigations were made on two or, at the 
most, three animals, and some of the workers had at their dis- 
posal for study only the material which had already been dis- 
sected by their predecessors, e. g.,Hyrtl. Their papers were 
. published some years ago (in the 40s or 50s), and leave much 
