OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 431 



the tree, that the young larvoe may avoid destruction, — the bird, mean- 

 whik^, is by a Hke careful selection, acquiring claws fitted to climb, and 

 a beak fitted to pierce the bark, and so has become a woodpecker. After 

 all the prolonged and patient eflforts of Nature, through countless ages, 

 the relative numbers remain precisely at the point from which they 

 started. 



Finally, if this theory is true, it should be carried much farther. 

 For why stop at the limits of human vision ? Why at those of the best 

 microscopes ? Why even at those which we may expect the microscope 

 ultimately to attain ? Beyond and below these, there may exist myri- 

 ads of forms, myriads of created organisms, equally entitled, on all prin- 

 ciples of reasoning, to claim that they have been formed in the image 

 of that original pair. 



Four hundred and eighty-tliird meeting. 



May 8, 1860. — Monthly Meeting. 



The President in the chair. 



Dr. Kneeland, in reference to some criticisms which his 

 communication at the last meeting, upon the barking of 

 dogs, had called forth, remarked, — 



That, as regards the testimony adduced, which he said was the same 

 as had been extolled on the other side of the question, he had in- 

 troduced the testimony of the same hunter-naturalist, and his only, to 

 show that the wild dogs in question were widely different from the 

 common type of dogs, and that their voice could not be fairly compared 

 to the educated bark of domesticated dogs. 



As to the occurrence of indigenous wild dogs south of the Equator, 

 he maintained, on the authority of Hamilton Smith and others, that 

 the South American wild dogs are aguara or fox-dogs, and not true 

 dogs ; and also, on the authority of many naturalists, that the South 

 Pacific dogs have been inti'oduced from the Asiatic continent by their 

 Polynesian masters ; that, according to Dr. Pickering, there is prob- 

 ably no aboriginal dog in New Zealand ; that the dogs of the Namaqua 

 region in Southern Africa, on the authority of Anderssen, are half- 

 reclaimed jackals ; and that the Australian dingo, an exception to the 

 zoological character of that region, on the authority of Dr. Carpenter 



