218 NATURAL SCIENCE [October 



to the careful consideration of all teachers interested in the future 

 progress of biological science. 



Mr Garstang gives a practical illustration of the importance of 

 the study of living animals in his interesting paper " on some modi- 

 fications of structure subservient to respiration in Decapod Crustacea 

 which burrow in sand." It is to this that his general remarks are 

 prefaced, as follows : — 



" A good deal of scepticism has been expressed in recent years 

 by various writers as to the utility of the more trivial features which 

 distinguish the genera and species of animals from one another. I 

 do not think that such scepticism can excite much surprise if one 

 remembers that the vast majority of ' biologists ' are almost ex- 

 clusively engaged in the study of comparative anatomy and embry- 

 ology. The amount of attention paid to these branches of biology 

 has long been utterly out of proportion to the scant attention 

 devoted to the scientific study of the habits of animals and of the 

 function of the organs and parts composing their bodies. With 

 isolated and noteworthy exceptions, the only naturalists who 

 seriously add to our knowledge of the latter subjects are those who 

 travel in distant countries, and who are thus thrown into close re- 

 lations with animals in their native haunts. Yet all the time there 

 are thousands of forms living on our own coasts and almost at our 

 very doors of whose detailed habits and life-conditions we know 

 practically nothing. I venture to think that the time has come 

 for consideration whether the subject of bionomics (in Prof. 

 Lankester's sense of the word) should not receive more adequate 

 recognition than it does at present in the curriculum of our univer- 

 sities. That such recognition would almost immediately produce 

 effects in a rapid extension of our knowledge is certain ; and the 

 subject is invested with so much intrinsic interest, as well as with 

 such important bearings on the problems of evolution, that I believe 

 such recognition would also have the effect of attracting many 

 students to the pursuit of morphology who at present avoid it as a 

 region of mere comparative anatomy. . . . 



" It must in any event, however, remain clear that the great 

 problems which Darwin left us as his heritage, after so greatly 

 illuminating them, are not to be solved by the exclusively morpho- 

 graphical researches which occupy the time and zeal of the great 

 majority of naturalists to-day. Even in the best of hands such 

 researches are capable of obscuring even the simple facts of structure 

 which they profess to elucidate ; while the study of the functional 

 relations of parts, side by side with the anatomical elucidation of 

 the parts themselves, provides not only the data for generalisations 

 of intrinsic importance, but assistance of an invaluable character in 

 the field of morphological criticism." 



