ZOOLOGY AS RELATED TO EVOLUTION. 



BY JOHN C. KIMBALL. 



MAN has always had a deep interest in animals. When 

 he first woke to consciousness from the sleep of his own 

 brute infancy in the early morning of the world's day, pos- 

 sibly its Tertiary hour, he found them already risen before 

 him, a habit of precedence they still keep up, crawling as 

 insects over his face, singing as birds in his ear, sporting as 

 quadrupeds at his side. The oldest works of art found on 

 earth, Pre-raphaelite by at least two hundred thousand 

 years, as well as in other qualities, are etchings of their 

 forms on plates of reindeer horn exhumed from anteglacial 

 caves ; and the liking for them and for pictures and stories 

 about them, and the aptness for getting acquainted with 

 them which all children exhibit to-day, are but the individ- 

 ual child repeating in himself, according to a well-known 

 law of evolution, the intimacy and wonder for them which 

 he learned originally in his childhood as a race. How close 

 ever since have been his relations with them, how impress- 

 ive to him their instincts and intelligence, so like yet unlike 

 his own, how many and varied their contributions to the 

 beauty and glory of his dwelling-place and to the comfort 

 and joy of himself ! Beneath all outward differences they 

 have been his fellow - citizens in the great kingdom of 

 Nature, his inevitable neighbors and associates, if not his 

 recognized blood-relations, in the great family of life. Dele- 

 gations of them have toiled with him at the plow, hunted 

 with him in the chase, fed with him at the table, played 

 with him at the fireside, traveled with him in the journey, 

 fought with him on the battle-field. All the deeper experi- 

 ences of his own existence birth, growth, pain, pleasure, 

 love's thrill, and death's agony he has seen repeated in 

 them. Language is filled with expressions for the qualities 

 and activities they have in common men, wolfish and foxy; 

 bulls and bears in Wall Street ; camels, " ships of the desert ; 

 and ships in their turn " ocean greyhounds." Great nations 

 have used them as the emblems of their power made them 

 play what a part in history as the Koman eagles, the British 



