The British Association met this year at Plymouth on Wednes-
day, and hitherto the proceedings have been unusually dull. The President, Dr. Allen Thomson, delivered an address, which was really a lecture on embryology, and far too technical for general comprehension, and on Thursday the addresses generally were of little public interest. ,sperhaps the most notable was, Professor Macalister's, ou emb*ogy, in the course of which he considered it proved, from the Moinute and careful studies made of sharks' eggs, that the limbs of mammals are the divided remains of a continuous lateral fin ; and " examination of the Structure of the parts making up the limbs of the vertebrates leads us to believe that each limb contains materials for more than one metamere, and it becomes an interesting subject for speculation as to why in vertebrate animals the number of limbs has never exceeded two pairs," There is no morphological reason, and the reason, therefore, must be mechanical,—bipedal and quadrupedal animals deriving from their limited number of legs some advantage in the struggle for existence. It would fol- low, we presume, that supposing conditions slightly altered—sup- posing the soil, for instance, as yielding as sand sometimes is—we might have had a hundred-legged horse—or a twelve-legged man, an idea which opens a strange vista of possibilities in other planets. But might not the extra materials be survivals, like the toes in a horse's hoof ?
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