1874.] 115 [Gray. 



upper jaw in sharks and skates, under the light afforded by 

 his investigation of the embryo skate, he suggests that the 

 cartilage which extends from the olfactory fossae towards the 

 pectoral fin is the probable homologue of a maxillary bone, 

 and that in the lobe, the homologue of an intermaxillary ; 

 that, if so, the skates and proteiform reptiles agree in having 

 the nostrils open in front of the dental arch ; that while in 

 all Batrachians the nasal groove becomes closed, in the skate 

 it remains permanently open ; and finally that this view, if 

 confirmed, "will add another feature which justifies Owen, 

 Agassiz and others, in dissenting from Cuvier so far as to 

 give the Selachians a place in the zoological series higher 

 than that of the bony fishes. But at the same time, it will 

 give corroborative proof of the correctness of Cuvier's view, 

 that ' the rudiments of the maxillaries, and intermaxillaries, 

 .... are evident in the skeleton.' " 



In attempting these analyses, I am drifting into a fault 

 which Prof. Wyman never committed, that of being too 

 long. So I must leave many of his papers unmentioned, 

 and barely refer to two or three others which cannot be 

 passed over. The most noteworthy of the shorter papers, 

 however, are upon less technical or more generally interest- 

 ing topics, so that we have need only to be reminded of 

 them. Among them are his ** Observations on the Develop- 

 ment of the Surinam Toad," and the same of "Anableps 

 Grotiovii" and the paper tf On some unusual Modes of Ges- 

 tation." The importance of these papers lies, not in being 

 accounts of some of the most striking curiosities of the ani- 

 mal world, but in the sagacity and quickness with which he 

 discerned, and the clearness with which he taught, the lessons 

 to be learned from them. Any good zoologist, with the same 



