Studies in the Evolution of Animals. By E. Bonavia, M.D.
With 108 Illustrations. (Archibald Constable and Co.)—The last half of this book should have been omitted. It consists of miscellaneous papers on animal anatomy, and does not bear on the main purpose of the earlier chapters, which is sufficiently interesting by itself. Dr. Bonavia has been struck by the limited number of ornamental patterns seen on animals, and has tried to account for their origin. To do this, he has studied in detail the markings of mammals, and illustrated them by a number of admirable plates of skins, and portions of skins, with outline drawings showing varieties of the rosette pattern on dappled horses and cattle. His theory centres on the evolution of the " rosette " pattern, He finds the origin of this complex
ornament in an original carapace, composed of rosettes, supposed to have been worn by the ancestors of existing species, which has left its traces on the skin, just as the plates cf crocodile armour have corresponding marks upon the hide. As evidence he takes the carapace of the extinct glyptodonts, which had a complete carapace of bony rosettes, and concludes that the rosetted mammals are descended frcm "extinct animals with a glyptodontoid carapace." In the absence of any evidence given by the remains of fossil species that the rosetted cats were descended from creatures like a tortoise, we are deterred from following Dr. Bonavia any further in his ingenious course of reasoning. The connection between the horse and the rhinoceros, and the fact that the latter is covered with a semi- plated skin, makes the theory more tempting in the case of striped and dappled equine creatures than in that of the eats. But the evidence that markings on animals follow the lines of internal structure, seems too strong to be shaken on the evidence adduced by Dr. Banavia.
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