ie eS aA 
1884.] Recent Literature, 271 
valuable, though we doubt if some of the author’s views will 
command generalassent. The details appear to have been worked 
out with care, while the drawings seem to have been very care- 
fully made by the author, and beautifully engraved by Lovendal. 
In the course of his lengthy views of the works of his prede- 
cessors, the author criticises and disproves Newport views that 
the head of chilopods is composed of eight sub-segments. Four 
pages of the memoir are devoted to an elaborate and useful tabu- 
lar view of the opinions of forty-six authors as to the morphology 
and nomenclature of the mouth-parts. 
Dr. Meinert gives a new explanation and nomenclature of the 
mouth-parts. He also claims that they are homologous with 
those of biting insects, or, to use his own words, set forth in an 
idiom peculiarly his own, “ it is purposed to serve me to show the 
coincidence of the head of Chilopoda and its parts of the mouth 
with the head of the Insect and its parts of the mouth, especially 
in the Orthoptera, that is to say, in insects with free biting parts 
of the mouth, and four pairs of these parts or four metamers in 
the head.” Here it may be remarked that Meinert does not re- 
gard the antennz and the antennal segment as homologues of the 
other mouth-parts and segments. In his own words, “ The real 
head then must be said to consist of the three foremost metamers, 
together with their exponents or limbs; that is to say, the labium, 
‘he maxillz and the mandibles, and besides of the lamina cephal- 
ca, which latter, as well as its appendages, the antennz, I by no 
means can consider to be homonomeous with the other metamers 
of the body and of the head, and with their exponents.” Mei- 
nert's reasons for rejecting the view that the so-called antennal 
segment is not such, are weak and unsatisfactory; its form is 
necessarily unlike the other segments, as it constitutes a preoral 
Segment and the front of the head; it is therefore unlike the suc- 
ceeding segments, though homologous with them. He considers 
ed as 
Splendid memoir (published, however, since Meinert’s present 
Paper) appears to confirm Metschnikoff’s views. Meinert claims 
that “ neither in the Chilopoda nor in the insects can any ventral 
Part be pointed out in the lamina cephalica;” and he also insists 
that the alimentary canal does not pass through the antennal 
segment, or, as he calls it, Zamina cephalica. But if any one will 
*xamine Sograff’s Figs. 38, 39 and 43, we think that he will ad- 
ut that Sograff fully proves that, as in insects, the alimentary 
canal at first opens as a mouth in the middle of the antennal seg- 
ha Moving back into the mandibular segment in after life, 
ile the antennæ arise as pleural outgrowths in almost exactly 
