AMERICAN ZOOLOGISTS AND EVOLUTION. 501 



suggestions of Dr. Brooks, lead one to consider how far the influence 

 of selection has had to do with the character of great communities, as 

 to their intelligence or ignorance. When we see nations of the same 

 great race-stock, one showing a high percentage of illiterates, a high 

 death-rate, degradation and ignorance, while just across the borders 

 another nation, apparently no better off so far as physical environments 

 are concerned, with percentage of illiterates and death-rate low, intel- 

 ligent and cleanly, we are led to inquire if here a strict scientific scru- 

 tiny with careful historical investigation will not reveal the cause of 

 these conditions. Can it be proved beyond question that the illiteracy 

 and degradation of Italy and Spain, up to within recent years at least, 

 is the result of centuries of church oppression and the Inquisition, 

 destroying at once or driving out of the land all independent thinkers, 

 and at the same time forcing her priests to lead celibate lives and in- 

 ducing others of cultivated and gentle minds to lead cloister lives ? Is 

 it also a fact, as Alphonse de Candolle asserts, that by far the greater 

 number of distinguished scientists have come from Protestant pastors ? 

 He gives a significant list of eminent men whose fathers were Protes- 

 tant pastors, saying that, had they been priests of another religion, 

 leading celibate lives, these men would not have been born. 



It is considered an intrusion into matters which do not concern 

 science when such inquiries are made, but the scientist has very deeply 

 at heart the intellectual and moral welfare of the community. If the 

 cause of degradation and ignorance, of poverty, of contagious disease, 

 or of any of the miseries which make a nation wretched, can be pointed 

 out by scientific methods, then it is the stern duty of Science to step in 

 and at least show the reasons, even if the remedy is not at once forth- 

 coming. The men who would be reformers and agitators, and who by 

 their earnestness and devotion get the attention of multitudes, are unfit 

 for their work if they show their ignorance, as most of them do, of the 

 doctrines of natural selection and derivation. 



Dr. C. S. Minot * read a paper before the Cincinnati meeting of 

 this Association, suggesting a rather startling proposition as to whether 

 man is the highest animal, which led Dr. W. N. Lockington f to reply 

 in a very able article entitled "Man's Place in Nature." 



The great problem of food-supply has led to legislative enactments 

 for the purposes of regulating the trapping and netting of game and fish. 

 State and Government grants have been made for fish commissions ; 

 but, unless the public are clearly educated in the rudiments of zoologi- 

 cal science and the principles of natural selection, appropriations will 

 come tardily and in limited amounts. Dr. W. K. Brooks, J in his re- 

 port to the State of Maryland as one of the oyster commissioners, after 

 showing the absurd way in which the problem of oyster-protection has 



* *' Proceedings of the American Associated Antiquarian Society," toI. xxx, p. 240. 



f " American Naturalist," vol. xvii, p. 1003. 



X " Keport of the Oyster Commissioners of Maryland," 1884, p. 31. 



