rior.

More than 200 species are enumerated in this list which have not before been credited to the region of the Lake. The collections were made at Bayfield, Wisconsin, during June and July.

The following introductory remarks are of sufficient general interest to be quoted at some length. The time for an accurate map of the faunal regions of the continent has not yet come-nor will it before another century at least of careful investigation has enabled us to fix approximately the range of the rarer forms of insect life. It is evident to any one who will read with care and with some understanding of the general principles of distribution, that many of the recent theories as to the division of our country into "life-zones" have very little foundation in fact. If better proof were wanting of this, we might point to that of authors changing from year to year their arbitrary arrangement of our zoo-geographical regions-uniting to-day two or three of those of older authors, and separating them again a few months later on. All this may or may not be progress, but it will all have to be gone over again in the light of a wider knowledge than seems to be at present in the possession of certain writers who cannot rest without having first shown us that all previously conceived ideas are totally wrong, and that their explanation of the distribution of life is the only plausible one. A single group of animals may or may not indicate in a general way the lines of distribution followed by a larger number-but it is manifestly unreasonable to hope for a stable method of division of a country into life-zones before the life of that country is well-known.

EMBRYOLOGY.'

The Effect of Lithiumchloride upon the Development of the Frog and Toad egg (R. fusca and Bufo vulgaris.)—The results of the series of experiments performed in the histological laboratory at Munich with this salt seem of no little interest, and especially is this the case with the result obtained with a 0·5 per cent solution. In every instance the eggs were placed in the solutions (varying from 1 per cent to 0-2 per cent) between a half and an hour and a half after fertilization.

1 Edited by E. A. Andrews, Baltimore, Md., to whom abstracts reviews and preliminary notes may be sent.

2 A. Gurwitsch, cand. med. Anat. Anz., XI, 65–70.

The blastula obtained with the 5% solution the author attempts, with some degree of plausibility, to make out to be of far reaching morphological importance. Whereas in all other cases development was either more or less hindered or was abnormal, in this case it was entirely symmetrical. The first indication of gastrulation appeared as a ring sinking about the equatorial plane and embracing the entire circumference. Sections showed a large mass of what the author calls passive yolk cells or endoderm forming the lower half, while the upper half, composed of a layer of ectoderm and one of active endoderm, forms a sort of cap covering it.

At a later stage this cap almost includes the lower passive entoderm, and, as the author points out, forms a gastrula that, if the passive yolk be removed, very closely resembles the gastrula of Amphioxus. From this it may seem more or less probable that the primitive amphibian gastrula may have been radially symmetrical, and that bilateral symmetry appeared later. Further it appears that the upper or large invagination of the amphibian egg is not the blastopore, but this is represented by the entire circle including the yolk plug.

It may be noted also, that if instead of supposing the passive entoderm to be removed, it be supposed to be greatly increased, one then has a gastrula of the meroblastic type.

Another point of interest is the manner in which the cells of the socalled "active endoderm," or those bordering the equatorial ring, proliferate. This proliferation according to the author has already begun when the invagination of the outer surface commences; so that instead of there being a pushing in of the outer surface, as the process is usually described, there seems to be a pulling in. Whether this process is due to the "cytotropism" described by Roux for the cells of the dividing frog egg, or to the taking up of the space occupied by the absorbed contents of the blastula cavity, as described by Hatschek for Amphioxus, is not clear.

The embryos obtained differ from those obtained by O. Hertwig with NaCl, in that the brain capsule does not close up and the dying away of the brain matter does not take place, and again instead of the animal cells breaking down as in NaCl, it is the yolk cells that crumble away. Finally one abnormal lithiumchloride embryo has an adverse significance for the concrescence theory.

It is to be hoped that the author intends later to publish a more extensive paper, which shall be more fully illustrated.-F. C. K.

ANTHROPOLOGY.1

An Inquiry into the Origin of Games.-An examination of the games of the Far East (Korea, China and Japan) and a comparison of them with certain games of the North American Indians as explained by Mr. F. H. Cushing, has induced Mr. Culin (Korean Games, with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan, by Stewart Culin, Director of the Museum of Archeology and Paleontology of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1895) to believe that the true game in the American and Asiatic region referred to, is a traceable descendant of primitive religious divinatory formulæ, reaching back to a time in the process of human development, when man freshly inspired by the phenomena of earth an sky, symbolized in his ceremonies the directions of the four winds, and foretold fate or fortune with arrows.

Because American Indians divine by arrows, because archery, and sets of arrows corresponding in number to Asiatic cosmic divisions, arrow derived grave posts, and guild tallies notched and named like arrows, still survive in Korea, and because arrow like rods are still used there in divinatory formula by fortune tellers, Mr. Culin has been led to regard arrow divination as a primitive and original form of fortune telling, and while the totemic arrow marks on short round gambling

Fig. 1. Haida Indian gambling stick suggesting derivation from the arrow. One of a set of 32 bearing devices of the totemic animals of the worlds' quarters supposed to have been derived (traceably perhaps through an intermediate set marked with colored ribbons) from arrow shaftments such as were used by the McCloud River Indians.

sticks of northwest coast Indans are urged as indications of the arrow ancestry of the latter, the same interesting suggestion is made as to the cylindrical earthen stamps from Ecquador and the round and flat engraved cylinders from Babylonia. Twenty-three out of the ninetyseven Korean games described (though in many cases the clue is not 'This department is edited by Henry C. Mercer, University of Penna, Phila.

stated) and particularly games played on diagrams like the Korean Nyout, (Paches) or chess, are held to suggest a primitive divining board

Fig. 2. Cylindrical earthenware stamp from Ecuador suggesting derivation from the arrow. It bears a highly conventionalized device representing a bird. It's striking resemblance to the Haida gambling sticks suggests its own derivation from the carved shaftments of arrows and furnishes also a clue to the probable origin of the Babylonian seal cylinders.

-the world, with the quarters of the four winds "the heavens above and the earth beneath," where the relations of arrows thrown, scattered red or distributed, symbolized the early callings of man upon fate, the first soothsayer's translation of unseen causes into the events of life.

The investigation deals with evanescent and elusive conditions and of necessity the family tree of games is often vague and disjointed. An etymology, arrow notches on a card, scorings on sticks, the pas

Fig. 3. Count Staves of wood used by Kiowa Indians suggesting derivation from arrows, emplosed in the game of Zohn ahl, they are inscribed with marks resembling arrow decoration and shaftment.

times of Indians in America and of far Orientals in Asia depending often upon the impartial testimony of the investigator have seemed to lead humanity backward in the cases and countries cited, not to the flight of birds, the observed instincts of animals, or the virtues of plants or minerals, but to the arrow as the ancestral symbol of the human necromancer. The Korean game of Nyout, where the throwing of marked sticks scores on a dotted diagram, seems related to divi

nation because its arrangement of dots looks like magical diagrams in an ancient Chinese book of divination while there are throws, and

Fig. 4. Kwa Zsin Chinese (wooden) divining splints. Four of a set of sixthfour, suggesting by their notched points and name (tsim resembling tsin, arrow) a derivation from arrows.

arrangements, and suites, and figures in the game that seem to connect it with chess, and with dice and backgammon and other Korean dice and board games, thus, we are told, putting the latter familiar and Europeanized class of games into the line of succession from the primitive formulæ of the arrow diviner. Long narrow Korean playing cards, resembling a set of Chinese lottery arrows similarly marked,

Fig. 5.

Devices representing numerals on the backs of Korean playing Cards, (htou-tjyen fighting tablets). The devices suggests in their shape a derivation from the cut cock feathers on arrows.