266 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the then still new doctrine of descent of Darwin, but a sure tact pre- 

 served bim from tbe mistake of permitting it to bave any influence 

 on bis great work. Tbe prospectus also gives information on tbis sub- 

 ject ; for be says at tbe close of it, in tbe name of tbe publisher : " The 

 question will come up with every one of what will be tbe attitude of 

 this work toward tbe movement of our time which is leaving away 

 bebind itself the mark of exact research, and is losing its head in the 

 regions of speculation. On tbis subject it is proper to remark that 

 the author has not followed this movement in the present work ; that 

 he has kept aloof from the strifes of tbe learned and from brilliant 

 conjectures ; and in tbe well-understood interest of the layman, who 

 will seek instruction through him, he has confined himself to demon- 

 strated facts and established observations. No one, therefore, need 

 fear that his faith or conscience will be damaged, or that he will have 

 reason to be afraid on account of bis similarity with monkeys." 

 Brehm was also aware that he must in his treatise abandon the region 

 of the systematic in which all other text-books of zoology were cast. 

 " With the abandonment of the sterile domain of the systematic," he 

 says again in his prospectus, " a rich field of observation has opened 

 out before the eye of the naturalist." But be well understood that he 

 could not include everything with this one-sided view, and knew that 

 the naturalist could not be a fast-bound teacher, but must lead the life 

 of a hunter and wanderer, as he himself had done till then. He con- 

 siders expressly, in the preface to the second series of his " Tbierleben," 

 tbe manner in which readers will have to judge it : " The ' Tbierleben ' 

 is not afraid of a stringent criticism. Whoever seeks in it what the 

 title and the opening pages will justify bim in looking for will not find 

 himself deceived ; for, if he will always keep the title in mind, he will 

 not seek there for what he can not find." He was so fortunate as to 

 have the aid, in preparing his first edition, of the gifted animal-painter 

 Robert Kretscbmer, of Leipsic. The two men were well acquainted 

 with each other. They had both been attached to the Abyssinian 

 expedition, Kretschmer as its artist ; and the water-color illustrations 

 of it, painted on the spot, which he brought home with him, are 

 among the most beautiful of their kind. Brehm was, therefore, quite 

 right in calling his first edition an illustrated " Tbierleben " ; those 

 fresh, lively pictures, painted with such grasping perception and free- 

 dom from restraint, contributed greatly to pave its way to tbe public ; 

 without them, the success of tbe book, notwithstanding its excellent 

 contents, would have been much smaller. Brehm wrote the first five 

 volumes of his book between 1863 and 1868, while Oskar Schmidt and 

 C. L. Taschenberg prepared the sixth volume, containing invertebrates. 

 A second edition, in ten volumes, was published in 1868, and the follow- 

 ing years. The great pains with which the whole work was gradually 

 pushed to completion bore good fruit, and, when we state that the 

 book was translated into most of tbe living literary languages, it is not 



