Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/422

406 occupy, they undergo rapid multiplication and growth, and build up the tissues of the body, while the scaffolding of follicle cells is torn down and used up as food for the true embryonic cells. An imaginary illustration may help to make the subject clear. Suppose that while carpenters are building a house of wood the brick-makers pile clay on the boards as they are carried past, and shape the lumps of clay into bricks as they find them scattered through the building where they have been carried with the boards. Now, as the house of wood approaches completion, imagine the bricklayers build a brick house over the wooden framework and not from the bottom upward, but here and there wherever the bricks are to be found, and that as fast as parts of the brick house are finished the wooden one is torn down. To make the analogy complete we must imagine that all the structure which is removed is assimilated by the bricks, and is thus turned into the substance of new bricks to carry on the construction."

Following that descriptive portion of the work comes a most interesting interweaving of facts gathered in wide experience with a scientific imagination possible only to one who had lived and thought in close sympathetic contact with tropical marine life. It is an account of the present conditions of life along tropical shores and the probable steps that led to the evolution of the innumerable sedentary and creeping things from the ancestral forms that floated on the surface of the ocean before there were shores. Charming reading for the layman, and for the specialist a broadening poetic insight into life as it is and as it was when the world was young and the pelagic forbears of the vertebrates competed with their simpler associates in the annexation of the bottom as a vantage ground for the "benevolent assimilation" of later immigrants. The third portion of the work follows a most commendable plan: "Scientific controversy is so unprofitable that I shall try to make it as subordinate as possible, that the reader may devote all his attention to the life history of Salpa, without interruption at every point where my own observations confirm or contradict the statements of others." This section deals with the refutation of criticism of the author's interpretations, and endeavors to harmonize the discords that in this, as in all complex morphological research, make progress slow though surer.

The above brief references to the research work of the subject of this sketch would be too incomplete did we omit mention of his papers upon that very interesting and extremely ancient inhabitant of the Chesapeake, the Lingula, or of the beautifully illustrated memoir of the National Academy of Sciences, describing the crania of the Lucayan Indians, an unfortunate race of gentle beings