456 
POPULAK SCIENCE EE VIEW. 
bability been introduced from Madagascar ; but the parrots and pigeons of 
wbicb Leguat speaks have yanisbed. The remains of one of the first, and 
the description of the last, leaye little room to doubt that they also were 
closely allied to the forms found in Madagascar and the other Mascarene 
islands } and thus it is certainly clear that /our out of the seir indigenous 
species had their natural allies in other species belonging to the same 
zoological province. It seems impossible on any other reasonable suppo- 
sition than that of a common ancestry to account for this fact. The 
authors are compelled to the belief that there was once a time when 
Rodriguez, Mauritius, Bourbon, Madagascar, and probably the Seychelles, 
were connected by dry land, and that that time is sufficiently remote to have 
permitted the descendants of the original inhabitants of this now submerged 
continent to become modified into the many different representative forms 
which are now known. "Whether this result can have been effected by the 
process of Natural Selection ” must remain an open question ; but that the 
solitaire of Rodriguez, and the dodo of Mauritius, much as they eventually 
came to differ, sprang from one and the same parent stock, seems a deduction 
so obvious, that the authors can no more conceive any one fully acquainted 
wuth the facts of the case hesitating about its adoption, than that he can 
doubt the existence of the Power by whom these species were thus fonned. 
The Whitebait a Herring. — In a paper before the Zoological Society, Dr. 
Gunther, in dealing with the clupeoids of the British coasts, gave it as his 
opinion that the whitebait is really a young herring. W^e are glad to learn 
the belief of one of the most eminent of European ichthyologists, and the 
more so as it confirms the opinion expressed in an article in one of our 
earlier volumes, in which the writer expressed his conviction, that the ana- 
tomical affinities of the herring and whitebait were so close as to justify 
their being grouped into one species. 
The forthcoming Volumes of the Hay Society. — The treatises of the Ray 
Society in preparation are as follows: — Professor Allman on the British 
Corynidse; Rev. 0. P. Cambridge, a supplementary volume on British 
Spiders j Messrs. Douglas and Scott on the British Hemiptera Homoptera ; 
Dr. Gaertner on Hybridism in Plants (Bastarderzeugung), translated from 
the German by W. Carruthers, Esq., F.L.S. ,* Mr. Hancock on the British 
Tunicata j Herr Kaltenbach’s Phytophagous Insects, translated from the 
German by H. T. Stainton, F.R.S. ; Sir John Lubbock on the British Thy- 
sanura ,* Dr. M’Intosh on the British Annelids ; Mr. St. George Mivart, 
Monograph of the Tailed Amphibia j Mr. Andrew Murray on the Coniferae ; 
A Synopsis of the Fauna and Flora of Palestine, by the Rev. H. B. Tris- 
tram, F.L.S. and Professor Westwood on the Mantidae, with illustrations 
by Mr. E. A. Smith. 
Mr. Berkeley on Mr. Day'win’s Vieivs. — Mr. Berkeley, as President of the 
Botanical Section of the British Association, commented, in the course of 
his address, on Mr. Darwin’s theory of Pangenesis— perhaps the most 
remarkable doctrine of modern material philosophy, and by no means the 
least probable. Others,” said Mr. Berkeley, ‘‘ as Owen and Herbert Spencer, 
had broached something of the kind, but not to such an extent, for the 
Darwinian theory included atavism, reversion, and inheritance, and em- 
braced mental peculiarities as well as physical. The whole matter was at 
