1 66 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Coslenterata. 19 writers. The great work of Nutting on hydroids must 

 be mentioned. Professor Nutting has made this subject very much his own, 

 and was even able to go to Plymouth, England, and discover new forms under 

 the eyes of the English zoologists. 



Sponges. 15 writers, three being Canadian. 



Protozoa. 15 writers. This group is not receiving a fair share of atten- 

 tion. 



So, on the whole, it appears that America is not seriously behind in 

 zoology. Yet, I certainly cannot claim that the position of the science 

 in this country is satisfactory. After all, the real question is, not 

 whether we are doing as much as other people, but whether we are 

 doing what we might, and ought. From this standpoint our deficien- 

 cies are serious enough. We are not, as yet, nearly able to cope with 

 the work that lies ready to our hands. When the writer was a boy, he 

 used to read and re-read such works as Wallace 's ' Malay Archipelago, ' 

 and look forward to the time when he too would travel, and would dis- 

 cover something new. To-day, in New Mexico, he would undertake 

 to find something new every day of the year, if he had no other occu- 

 pation; and hardly a day passes in the laboratory without the deter- 

 mination of some new fact. But alas, thousands of specimens remain 

 in closed boxes because there is nobody to work upon them; dozens of 

 promising investigations are never undertaken because there is nobody 

 to undertake them. Buildings, apparatus and books are well enough 

 in their way ; but the great need is for workers to make use of what is 

 already gathered and ready for use, and to take up the threads of 

 thought which flow from every investigation, and follow them to the 

 end. 



While we are seeking to add to the number of workers, something 

 should also be said about their quality. Undoubtedly, there is too 

 much narrowness, and too little general culture, an outward and visible 

 sign of which is the bad Latin published by many of the younger men 

 in the form of zoological names. At the meetings of the American 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, there are sections of zool- 

 ogy, botany, geology, anthropology, etc., all in session simultaneously. 

 The writer found it extremely annoying that he could not be in two or 

 more places at the same time, but very few seemed to see any objection 

 to the arrangement. This indicates limitations which must be regret- 

 ted, and it is hard to believe that they are inevitable. When the zool- 

 ogist ceases to know anything about the plants animals eat, or the 

 physical environment in which they live, or even the animals of other 

 groups than his own specialty, the broader ideas of biology will become 

 obscured and evolution itself will cease to be intelligible, just as archi- 

 tecture is nothing to him who studies only single and isolated bricks. 



