The Terre d'Auvergne was first an appanage of Count Alphonse of Poitiers (1241-1271), and in 1360 was erected into a duchy in the peerage of France (duch y -pairie) by King John II.
Here we must mention the intimate connexion between classification and geographical distribution as revealed by the palaeontological researches of Alphonse Milne-Edwards, whose magnificent Oiseaux Fossiles de la France a.
As to the origin of the peach two views are held, that of Alphonse de Candolle, who attributes all cultivated varieties to a distinct species, probably of Chinese origin, and that adopted by many naturalists, but more especially by Darwin, who looks upon the peach as a modification of the almond.
The various comparisons previously made between the structure of Limulus and the Eurypterines on the one hand, and that of a typical Arachnid, such as Scorpio, on the other, had been vitiated by erroneous notions as to the origin of the nerves supplying the anterior appendages of Limulus (which were finally removed by Alphonse Milne-Edwards in his beautiful memoir (6) on the structure of that animal), and secondly by the erroneous identification of the double sternal plates of Limulus, called " chilaria," by Owen, with a pair of appendages (7).
The cerebral mass is in Limulus more easily separated by dissection as a median lobe distinct from the laterally placed ganglia of the cheliceral somite than is the case in Scorpio, but the relations are practically the same in the two forms. Formerly it was supposed that in Limulus both the chelicerae and the next following pair of appendages were prosthomerous, as in Crustacea, but the dissections of Alphonse Milne-Edwards (6) demonstrated VI FIG.
