218 NATURAL SCIENCE [October 
to the careful consideration of all teachers interested in the future 
progress of biological science. 
Mr Garstang gives a practical illustration of the importance of 
the study of living animals in his interesting paper “on some modi- 
fications of structure subservient to respiration in Decapod Crustacea 
which burrow in sand.” It is to this that his general remarks are 
prefaced, as follows :— 
“ A good deal of scepticism has been expressed in recent years 
by various writers as to the utility of the more trivial features which 
distinguish the genera and species of animals from one another. I 
do not think that such scepticism can excite much surprise if one 
remembers that the vast majority of ‘ biologists’ are almost ex- 
clusively engaged in the study of comparative anatomy and embry- 
ology. The amount of attention paid to these branches of biology 
has long been utterly out of proportion to the scant attention 
devoted to the scientific study of the habits of animals and of the 
function of the organs and parts composing their bodies. With 
isolated and noteworthy exceptions, the only naturalists who 
seriously add to our knowledge of the latter subjects are those who 
travel in distant countries, and who are thus thrown into close re- 
lations with animals in their native haunts. Yet all the time there 
are thousands of forms living on our own coasts and almost at our 
very doors of whose detailed habits and life-conditions we know 
practically nothing. I venture to think that the time has come 
for consideration whether the subject of bionomics (in Prof. 
Lankester’s sense of the word) should not receive more adequate 
recognition than it does at present in the curriculum of our univer- 
sities. That such recognition would almost immediately produce 
effects in a rapid extension of our knowledge is certain; and the 
subject is invested with so much intrinsic interest, as well as with 
such important bearings on the problems of evolution, that I believe 
such recognition would also have the effect of attracting many 
students to the pursuit of morphology who at present avoid it as a 
region of mere comparative anatomy. .. . 
“Tt must in any event, however, remain clear that the great 
problems which Darwin left us as his heritage, after so greatly 
illuminating them, are not to be solved by the exclusively morpho- 
graphical researches which occupy the time and zeal of the great 
majority of naturalists to-day. Even in the best of hands such 
researches are capable of obscuring even the simple facts of structure 
which they profess to elucidate; while the study of the functional 
relations of parts, side by side with the anatomical elucidation of 
the parts themselves, provides not only the data for generalisations 
of intrinsic importance, but assistance of an invaluable character in 
the field of morphological criticism.” 
