1885. ] Editors’ Table. 973 
than at many previous meetings, may be safely asserted to have 
embraced a larger percentage of the scientific element than they. 
Although the number of papers read (175) was smaller than at 
some preceding meetings, the quality, in many of the sections at 
least, was exceedingly good. If it were possible we should pre- 
fer that the American Association might always meet beneath 
the shadow of a university, and in a town like Ann Arbor, whose 
raison d'etre consists of the university which it contains. But 
such towns are rare in the United States, and we cannot expect 
to be always surrounded by the favorable conditions of the meet- 
ing which has just closed its sessions. 
The controversy over the question whether the human 
embryo has a genuine tail like that of the embryo of other mam- 
mals, has been nearly set at rest by the painstaking researches of 
Professor Fol, of Geneva. 
We have translated his article from the reprint in the Journal 
de Micrographie for June, and the reader may for himself see how 
this skilled histologist has proved the presence for a short period 
in embryos in the fifth and” sixth week of their development, of 
four embryonic vertebre, which after the sixth week fuse together ; 
the tail itself at first elongated and regularly conical, becoming 
shorter and more rudimentary. Professor Fol, in closing, simply 
contents himself with remarking that the embryo human tail well 
deserves the name, and that the organ “evidently deprived of all 
physiological utility, should be classed in the number of repre- 
sentative organs.” 
This temporary, deciduous organ, which appears for only a 
brief period and still comparatively early in embryonic life, points 
unmistakably to the origin of man from some tailed mammal, 
‘whether a monkey, or some less specialized form, possibly allied 
to that generalized type, the lemur. 
This instance is one of several others in the growth and struc- 
ture of the human body which affords so strong circumstantial 
evidence of man’s descent from some lower animal form, that it 
amounts, in minds trained to embryological, 22 eames and ana- 
tomical methods, to the strongest probability. 
= —— The death of that veteran French naturalist, Henri Milne- 
Edwards, who at the great age of eighty-five passed away July 
29, in his house in Rue Cuvier near the Jardin des Plantes, is a 
notable event in the history of biological science. Milne-Edwards 
