204 Zoology as Related to Evolution. 



lion, and the Russian bear ! Poetry has found in them some 

 of its most suggestive themes, soaring with them how loftily 

 in Bryant's Waterfowl, singing with them how sweetly in 

 Shelley's Skylark, running with them how gracefully in 

 Cowper's Hares, swinging with them how enchantingly in 

 Lowell's June bird " atilt like a blossom among the leaves," 

 and galloping with them how gloriously in Sheridan's steed 

 bearing its rider and victory to Cedar Creek and a flying 

 army thirty miles away ! Who would lose out of fiction 

 Ulysses's faithful dog, or the lesson-teaching asses, apes, and 

 foxes of ^Esop's Fables, or Don Quixote's Rozinante, or the 

 Cid's Bavieca, or Scott's The Antlered Monarch of the 

 Waste, or Dickens's Boxer and Jip, or Poe's croaking Raven, 

 or, later, Mrs. Sewell's Black Beauty, or even Mary's Little 

 Lamb ? With what a wealth of vigor and grace they have 

 lent themselves to painting in the canvas of Landseer and 

 of Rosa Bonheur, and to sculpture in such marbles as The 

 Plunging Horses and The Farnese Bull ! Astronomy has 

 taken them as its helper into the far-off skies, bidding the 

 North forever know its place with a Great and Little Bear, 

 covering the earth in its cool autumn nights with an Eagle's 

 starry wings and establishing in the solemn heavens the 

 never-stopping merry-go-round of its Zodiacal Ram, Bull, 

 Crab, Lion, Scorpion, Goat, and Fishes. And even in the 

 midst of Religion's grand service and majestic thoughts 

 they have occupied how large a place both as the victims 

 offered the gods and as the very gods they were offered to 

 even in our Christian faith have borne on their backs what 

 mighty doctrines as the Serpent, the Worm, the Dove, the 

 Lion of Judah, and the Lamb of God ! 



It is out of this great wonder realm of animal life, asso- 

 ciated with man in so many ways and of which he himself 

 is so vital a part, that Zoology has arisen, seeking to arrange 

 its objects, to discover their structure, relations, and laws, and 

 to get at their cause and reason. There is no other branch 

 of science which alike in its materials and in itself is so full 

 of interest, no other which embodies so completely the great 

 world-wide principles of evolution and on the field of which 

 the battles against it have been so fierce and the victories 

 for it so brilliant, no other which lets the student in so 

 close to the very workshop and elbow of Nature and so near 

 to the great mystery of life, no other which opens so sug- 

 gestively into the whole philosophy of man's own being, 

 both physical and mental, individual and social, as this ; and 



