REVIEWS OF RECENT LITERATURE. 
ZOOLOGY. 
An Anatomy of the Cat. 
omy to the beginner, few animals have received more attention than 
the cat, and the number of easily accessible books dealing with the 
structure of this animal is already large. The preparation of a new 
volume as a competitor in this field is hazardous, to say the least, 
and the present venture seems all the more so because its authors, 
Reighard and Jennings, do not propose to treat the subject in any 
novel way, but content themselves with the simple descriptive methods 
of the older anatomists. 
The text embodies a well-arranged systematic description of the 
organs of the cat. The terminology is for the most part a judicious 
compromise between the various recent attempts at a revised nomen- 
clature and the older systems. Its innovations are based chiefly on 
greater convenience in the use of terms, a principle which, though 
often ignored, eventually makes itself felt in the growth of all nomen- 
clatures. The orthography is said to follow the best English usage, 
in which case there should have been no final e in “foramen of 
Monroe.” 
The anatomical descriptions impress the reader as having been 
taken directly from the specimen, and, as a rule, show none of the 
forced character that is so often seen in Mivart’s account, where at 
times human anatomy seems to be directly transferred to the cat. 
The description of the divisions of the body cavity, however, is dis- 
tinctly misleading. >` The reader is told that this cavity is divided by 
the diaphragm into two parts, an abdominal cavity and a thoracic 
cavity, and the latter is described in some detail. The thorax of a 
Cat, however, does not contain a single large cavity but three such, 
one for the heart and one for each lung, and it is only after the 
scalpel of the student has been at work some time that such a cavity 
as that described can be said to exist. The impropriety of including 
such openings in the description of the anatomy.of an animal must 
: Een J., and Jennings, H. S. V of the Cat. Henry Holt & Co., 
"901. + 498 pp., 173 figures. 
597 
