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type ill the feral breed of the Ukraine, a stuffed specimen of 
which now at Dresden measures the almost incredible lensdli of 24 feet 
along its mane. “We find, too, hi comparing them with the wild breeds of 
other lands, with hot sun and warm sandy plains, with the wild breeds of 
America, with the domesticated breeds of Asia and Africa, that in repro- 
ducing these forms, though left entirely to ‘ natural selection,’ they but obey 
a law general to all.” The facts recorded in the above passages are ex- 
tremely interesting, but whilst they prove the tendency to vary which all 
organised beings exhibit, they are not opposed to Mr. Darwin’s doctrines, but 
rather corroborative of them ; they merely show that the horse removed from 
the conditions which led to its domestic characters lost these latter ; and when 
placed under those conditions which may have originally developed its feral 
characters, it assumed these also.— Vide Transactions of the Nova Scotian 
Institute of Natural Sciences, Vol. II., part 1. 
Skulls of Man and Athropoid Aj)e. — At a meeting of the Zoological Society, 
held on Tuesday, Nov. 7th, Professor Huxley read a very important paper 
upon the resemblance which exists between the crania of the children of 
certain races of man, and those of the higher apes. There are certain 
osteological features by which both the higher and lower apes resemble man, 
but there are also certain characters by which the lower forms more closely 
approach the human type than the higher ones. It is necessary, therefore, in 
estimating the value of the anatomical mdication of relationship, to exclude 
all those characters of approach to human kind, which are exhibited by crea- 
tures whose general characters point clearly to their degraded position in the 
animal scale. On doing this it will be found that the more important points 
which demonstrate the relation of the higher apes to man, are the altitude of 
the cranium, the position of the nasal bones, and the character of the maxillae. 
Professor Huxley’s examination of the skull of a child from one of the islands 
of the South Pacific Archipelago has led him to believe that the aj^proxuna- 
tion of the human to the quadrunianous is more strongly marked than has 
heretofore been supposed. Apparently there is an objection to this conclu- 
sion upon the ground that the skull examined having been that of a child, 
ten years old, the ethnological characters could not have been developed ; but 
this difficulty Mr. Huxley meets by asserting that in the cranium in question 
the race characters were so decidedly marked that it would have been quite 
impossible to have mistaken the specunen for a Caucasian cranium. 
The Development of the Bones of the Whale-hone Wales has been shown by 
Mr. Flower, the distinguished curator of the College of Surgeons’ Museum, 
to afford a clue to the identification of species. In the course of some recent 
observations made by him upon the anatomy of these animals he found that, 
owing to the circumstance that at a fixed period the epiphyses of the bones 
become confluent with the other portions, it would not be possible to meet 
with adult specimens of certain species, measuring various lengths. 
Nolo do Flies walk upon Smooth Vertical Surfaces ? — In regard to this 
question, which has from time to time been answered in all manner of ways, 
Mr. Blackwall announced his views to a meeting of the Linnean Society, held 
during the present session. From several experiments and observations 
carried out by this gentleman during the past summer, he arrives at the 
conclusion that these insects are not enabled to maintain their position by 
