228 proceedings: biological society 



THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON 



The 551st regular meeting of the Biological Society of Washington 

 was held at the Cosmos Club, Saturday, February 26, 1916; called to 

 order at 8 p.m. by President W. P. Hay. Fifty persons were present. 



The first paper of the program was by D. E. Lantz, An Early 

 Seventeenth Century mammalogist. This was a review of Edward Top- 

 sell's History of Foure-footed Beastes, published in London in 1607. 

 Topsell was born about 1538 and at the completion of this, the first 

 general work on mammals published in the English language, was 

 chaplain of the church of St. Botolph, Aldergate, under Richard Neile, 

 Dean of Westminster, to whom the book is dedicated. The work, 

 including illustrations, is largely translated from Conrad Gesner's 

 Historia Animalium, published in 1551; but the author quotes also 

 from the works of over 250 other writers — Hebrew. Greek, Latin. 

 German, Italian, and French authorities — including 76 medical trea- 

 tises. The speaker gave many curious extracts from Topsell, illustrat- 

 ing them with lantern pictures of the animals under discussion, taken 

 from the old wood cuts in the book. The pictures included those of 

 the antelope, an ape monster, the American sloth, the beaver, various 

 kinds of hyenas, the unicorn, the riverhorse, and the Su, an untamable 

 and ferocious animal that has been identified with the American opossum . 



The second and last paper of the program was by J. W. Gidley, 

 A talk on the extinct animal life of North America. Mr. Gidley defined 

 the terms fossil and petrifaction, explained how fossils were formed 

 under various conditions, and how they are discovered by the collector. 

 He discussed the evolution of certain animals as shown bjr their fossil 

 remains, and as particularly exemplified by horses, elephants, and 

 dinosaurs. He emphasized in especial the unfortunate tendency on the 

 part of paleontologists to try to see in fossil remains ancestral forms of 

 later fossils or of existing animals. The speaker thought that many 

 fossils represented highly specialized types of their kind, some extinct 

 animals being more highly specialized than their present day represen- 

 tatives; in fact in many cases their extreme specialization led to their 

 extinction. In a general way fossil forms represent the evolution of 

 certain groups, but the immediate connecting forms are for the most 

 part lacking. 



Mr. Gidley's communication was profusely illustrated with lantern 

 views of fossil-bearing localities, of fossils, and of certain artists' re- 

 storations of fossils. It was discussed by Dr. L. 0. Howard. 



M. W. Lyon, Jr., Recording Secretary. 



