MAMMALOGY — MILLER 397 



II 



Mammalogy, then, is more than the hobby of certain men endowed 

 with a strange curiosity. It is the scientific study of the mammalia, 

 the gathering and arranging for all who need them, of facts about 

 those animals which possess, at least during some phase of their 

 existence, hair and milk. The word mammalia appears to ha\e 

 been first used about the middle of the eighteenth century, by the 

 Swedish naturalist Karl von Linne, better known as Linnaeus. 

 Strange as it may seem, there had not been, up to that late day, 

 any distinctive name by which to designate the great assemblage of 

 animals to which we ourselves belong, together with our relatives 

 the whales, duckbills, bats, apes, and others, the most obvious group 

 characteristic of which is that the young must be fed on milk. 

 The term quadruped could not be used, for this is equally applicable 

 to the hairless, milkless lizard and tortoise. Linnaeus therefore 

 took the Latin word mamma'^ the name for the gland by whicli 

 milk is secreted, and telescoped it with the word animalia^ animals. 

 Mammalia, shortened from mammanimalia, was the result, and we, 

 in English, have made therefrom our vernacular word mammal ; 

 by adding a Greek termination meaning discourse we have further 

 produced the technical term mammalogy. Other languages have 

 not followed our example. Instead of using some form of the 

 Linnaean word the French, for instance, call these animals " mammi- 

 feres," bearers of milk glands, while the Germans know them as 

 " Saugethiere," or beasts that suck. 



As now used, the term mammalogy applies primarily to what is 

 known as the systematic study of mammals, the main object of 

 which is to find out exactly how many kinds of mammals there are 

 in the world, exactly where each kind lives, and exactly what are 

 the relationships of these creatures to each other and to their pre- 

 decessors now gone from the ranks of living things. 



This may seem on the face of it not a large undertaking. The 

 average person not specially interested in wijd life may know as 

 many as 20 or 30 different kinds of mammals; or, if he lives near 

 a good zoological garden, 50 or 75. Actually, in North America 

 alone we have discovered about 2,500 recognizably distinct kinds, 

 and the work of enumeration is not yet finished; from an area in 

 Eastern Africa scarcely one-tenth as large as North America, the 

 collections of the Smithsonian Institution include representatives 

 of no less than 526 kinds, all of them different from those found 

 in any part of the American continent. The Malay region with 

 its innumerable islands, and South America with its astonishingly 

 contrasted jungles, plains, and mountains, swarm with special sorts 

 of mammals whose existence is unsuspected by anyone not a student 



