516° Recent Literature. (May 
generations back, contributes (on the supposition of no intermar- 
riage of kinsfolk) less than one part in 16,000,000 to the constitu- 
tion of a man of the present day.” 
Mr. Galton thinks that if the father of a family of children col- 
lects all the required data concerning his own parents and grand- 
parents, and similarly those concerning the parents and 
parents of his wife, then it is probable in most cases that their 
children, being informed about all their ancestry up to their eight 
great-grandparents inclusive, will be equipped with almost as 
much hereditary information as they can need. 
s far our ignorance, the author claims, of the conditions by 
which the level of humanity may be raised, is so great that 
believes “if one had some dictator of the Spartan type, who exer- 
cised absolute power over marriages, assigning A to be the wife 
of B, and C to be the wife of D, and who acted with the best im- 
tentions, he might possibly do even more harm than good to the 
race.” No man is isolated from his fellows, but is “a prolonga- 
tion of his ancestry in no metaphorical sense,” and the author 
claims that the compilation of these registers will extend this 
conviction very widely. In order to obtain statistics bearing ka 
heredity, Mr. Galton offers £500 in prizes to those British 9 
jects resident in Great Britain who shall furnish him with the best 
extracts from their own family records. 
BALBIANI’S LECTURES ON THE Sporozoa. —The class of Sporo: 
zoa was founded by Leuckart in 1879, by wher” a as ar 
i 
as a new group of Protozoa. Besides the Gregarines 
perms. 
1 
Bütschli proposed the name of Myxosporidia for the Pso 
vinle be 
the term Sarcosporidia for the utriculiform Psorosperms, ai 
places among the Sporozoa a fifth group, which he ry cilk- 
Microsporidia, comprising the vibrating corpuscles © 
worm and allied organisms, regarded for a long time 2° 
f ; ; -= nsei 
As thus constituted we have, for the first time, 1n this us 
work a succinct and interesting account of these strange pf < 
: tissues of all animals 
among the Protophytes. One of them causes ‘ 
rapid and extreme multiplication in the liver of the of them 
_ also once occurred in man, producing death. - epizo- 
propagate epidemically, and give rise to more OF ess po 
otics ; such are the Sarcosporidia of the sheep and po 
les 
1 Cours d Embryogenie comparée du College de France. Lecons e e Prolene 
Par G. BALBIANI. pine se par le Dr. PELLETAN. Rerott Tiik 
Avec 52 figures intercalées dans le Texte et 5 Planches li 
Paris, 1884. 8vo, pp. 184. 
