262 
KICllAKD ASSIIETON. 
satisfaction to myself to realise that the first paragraph on 
p. 101 confirms the conclusion to which I came a year or 
two ago, that we have, on the one hand, in the Ungulates 
and some other groups great lateral expansion of the tropho- 
blast, leading to the type of placenta I called '^plicate,” and, on 
the other hand, cell proliferation of the trophoblast pro- 
ducing thickenings thereof leading to the type I called 
“ cumulate/’ 
But there is one point which Hubrecht alludes to only 
casually, namely, the part played by the uterine glands in 
the function of placentatiou. Maybe he does this purposely, 
because he proposes to deny the existence of a placenta to 
many forms of that type in which the glands play an all 
important part. Tims only forms like man, apes, insectivores, 
rodents, have placentas, while Equus, “ Sus, Nycticebus, 
Galago, and others” have none! 
Attempts at systematic arrangements based on placental 
characters having never been very successful up to now, 
there is no objection to this somewhat radical change in our 
conception.” But surely this makes confusion worse con- 
founded ! Therefore the sheep is a placental, the cow is a 
non-placental mammal 1 
We may not be able to agree over terms like “deciduous” 
and “ non-deciduous,” “ voll placenta” and “ halb placenta,” 
“conjoined” and “apposite,” “cumulate” and “plicate,” 
but do not let us quarrel over whether a certain organ of 
nutrition or respiration formed in various animals from 
identically the same morphological units, appearing at the 
same time in all, having the same general function in all, 
disappearing at the same period in all, is to be called by 
different names according to the mode in which it takes in 
its nourishment. 
Such a suggestion reminds one of Gideon’s method of 
selecting men by the way in which they drank from the 
Spring of Harod. An excellent method of determining the 
particular merits of the men for certain purposes, but those 
individuals did not cease to be men who lapped like a dog. 
