392 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 192 8 



foundation for research, and also of the economic importance of 

 science as its logical justification. There is no need to doubt the 

 unselfish heroism of a Kissinger and a Moran, refusing pecuniary 

 gain and risking their lives to enable Walter Reed to prove how 

 yellow fever is transmitted; neither can we question the economic 

 benefits to humanity which have come through the work of an 

 Edison; but such conspicuous instances of moral and economic in- 

 cexitive must not be allowed to obscure the fact that these have rarely 

 been the main forces which have induced men to enter the field of 

 scientific endeavor. And, as in the general history of science the 

 moral and humanitarian values were not realized until a compara- 

 tively late day, so in the development of the individual worker they 

 seem normally to come to the fore at a period after the scientific 

 bent of the mind has first been fully established. Pasteur furnishes a 

 typical example. Few men have done more for the direct welfare 

 of humanity than he, yet we are told that before he ever dreamed of 

 his studies of fermentation and disease he was a glutton for work, 

 entering the Sorbonne long before the hour when the professor was 

 due to lecture in order to make sure of obtaining a good seat. It was 

 only in after years that this intellectual enthusiasm became directed 

 toward those problems immediately connected with human welfare 

 the solution of which established Pasteur's imperishable fame. 



There is nothing to be gained by denying that discovery for its own 

 sake has always been the mainspring of work in all branches of 

 scientific endeavor — including mammalogy, which I propose to dis- 

 cuss. This incentive requires no other apology than an indication of 

 how the knowledge thus gained has contributed to human advance- 

 ment. Indeed, an understanding of the relationships between the 

 obscure seeker after facts and man's well-being must forever justify 

 the worker in pure research. 



Advance of civilization and enlargement of human conceptions 

 have always shown a direct relation to the growth of this knowledge, 

 and, on the other hand, there is reason to believe that civilizations 

 may have been on more than one occasion checked or destroyed 

 because of the lack of it. It has been suggested that the culture of 

 Greece, for instance, may have declined and finally perished through 

 lack of knowledge about the interwoven life histories of a mosquito 

 and a one-celled creature so small that it is able to live in the red 

 corpuscles of human blood and by its activities there to cause the 

 energy-sapping disease, malaria. It is not every kind of mosquito 

 that can carry this parasite, and the whole subject of malarial sani- 

 tation therefore depends primarily on a knowdedge of the species 

 and ranges of these insects, a knowledge which can only come from 

 studies of the kind usually known as " systematic." A clear under- 

 standing of other interwoven life histories like that of mosquito- 



