MAMMALOGY AND THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



By Geebit S. Miller, Jr. 

 Curator, Division of Mammals, United States National Museum 



[With three plates] 



Aristotle has said that all knowledge begins in wonder, and, 

 whether we accept his words as expressing the whole truth or only 

 a part of it, we can not fail to recognize that wonder acts as an 

 irresistible stimulus which drives men to exploring every detail of 

 the universe as truly as it sets a monkey to searching out every 

 corner of a cage. Modern knowledge is not the least of the results ; 

 and numberless men have found in the gathering and arranging of 

 this knowledge the greatest of their intellectual pleasures. But while 

 men and monkej^s have curiosity in common, men alone, so far as we 

 know, possess the attribute that, having done something because of 

 the satisfaction which comes from the doing, they feel constrained 

 to justify their work on grounds of religion, morality, or logic. Thus, 

 in the middle of the eighteenth century, we see Linnaeus, one of the 

 most enthusiastic and indefatigable students of nature that the world 

 has known, printing this invocation on the back of the title page 

 of his Systema Naturae : 



O Jehova 



Quam ampla sunt Tua Opera! 



Quam sap i enter Ea fecisti! 



Quam plena est Terra possessione Tua! 



Again, only 30 years ago, we find the Jesuit Father Heude, whose 

 greatest joy lay in studying the mammals of China and the Philip- 

 pine Islands, replying to strictures on the superabundance of his 

 publications in somewhat the following manner: That God had 

 created a multiplicity of mammals for the express purpose of testing 

 human ingenuity in finding and describing them, and that the 

 systematic papers complained of by the critics were only the answer 

 to this divine challenge, a duty imposed on their author by his office 

 as priest. 



At present, utterances like those of Linnaeus and Heude are not in 

 fashion, but we hear much about the love of humanity as a moral 



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