Milne-Edwards

Among them Professor Serres holds the first rank, and it is to him that Milne-Edwards alludes in the passage just cited.

Instinct of Insects.—One of the regular course of free scientific lectures delivered at the Paris Sorbonne this last winter, under the auspices of the Minister of Public Instruction, was by the distinguished naturalist M. Milne-Edwards, on the instinct and intelligence of animals.

Remains from Sansan and Langy in France have been referred by Alphonse Milne-Edwards to herons under the names of Ardea perplexa and A. formosa; a tibia from the Miocene of Steinheim am Albuch by Dr Fraas to an A. similis, while Sir R. Owen recognized a portion of a sternum from the London Clay as most nearly approaching this family.

He had an inborn interest in Natural History; he had dabbled in Entomology and done a little microscopic work; he had attended lectures by Owen and had enjoyed many a talk with Huxley; he had been influenced by Lamarck, Milne-Edwards, and von Baer; he had read hither and thither in medical and biological literature; but it is manifest that his own admission was true that he was "inadequately equipped for the task."

Similarly as regards authors, he was influenced by Lamarck's transformist theory, by Laplace's nebular hypothesis, by Malthus's theory of population, by Milne-Edwards' idea of the physiological division of labour, by von Baer's formula, by Hamilton and Mansel, by Grove's correlation of the physical forces, by Darwin's Origin of Species, and so on, but his own thought was always far more to him than anything he ever read.