Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/279

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
EDITOR'S TABLE.
267

twenty years ago—Dr. Kraepelin has since worked over the subject—that the sting of the bees and wasps is an organ composed of modified limbs, and is to be regarded as homologous with the organs which, in other insects, are devoted solely to reproductive functions. These points he carried out so that he could trace every portion of the one in the physiologically very different organ of the other.

The last of the studies which we can allude to are those of the development of Limulus. Dr. Lockwood, the first to study the subject, pointed out the similarity of the young horseshoe crab to the trilobites, and this Dr. Packard elaborated in his more extensive paper. His studies in this direction led him to investigate the ancestry of the king-crab, and he now has in press an extensive memoir on the fossil king-crabs, in which the subject will receive still further treatment, and will, no doubt, present many new views based upon the study of extensive suites of specimens.

Lives like this of Dr. Packard are of interest, not only in themselves, but as instances of heredity. Dr. Packard's father was a man of mark, as every graduate of Bowdoin will testify; while his grandfather Packard—a Revolutionary soldier—was a graduate of and a tutor in Harvard College. His maternal grandfather was the Rev. Dr. Appleton, formerly President of Bowdoin College. With such an ancestry, is it to be wondered that three of the sons should rise to eminence as college professors, while the fourth should become a prominent physician?



EDITOR'S TABLE.


CONGRESS AND INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT.

IF it were charged that under our system of government measures of interest to the whole people, particularly such as might chiefly concern their intellectual and moral welfare, were apt to receive less attention from the Legislature than measures of purely local concern, we fear that the action of Congress up to the present in the matter of international copyright might be cited as a striking case in point. For many years past the thinking men of the country, those who give it its intellectual standing among the nations of the world, have been urging the necessity, both as a matter of national self-respect and also as one vitally affecting our intellectual growth, of the enactment of an international copyright law. Congress, however, in its zeal for "appropriations" and for party strategy, saw nothing in this demand to commend it to any special attention. On the contrary, the question raised was not one that seemed to come at all within the range of practical politics. Had the promoters represented one party in the state, and had they been able to show that they were organized for effective party warfare, they would have got a respectful hearing at least from the side they supported. But no; they