Zoology as Related to Evolution. 205 



a lecture devoted not so much to its details, needing years 

 of study, as to its growth and larger teachings and to its 

 bearing on these other themes, may have its modest place, 

 even when the lecturer's qualification for it is only a love 

 about equally divided between its outside live objects and 

 its inside live truths. 



I. Looked at historically, the growth of the science itself 

 has been along the direct lines not only of evolution, but of 

 evolution in its Darwinian phase of mounting up from species 

 to species through variation, modifying environment, a strug- 

 gle for existence, and natural selection. In its beginnings and 

 lirst forms, the same as with life itself, it was vague, nebu- 

 lous, protoplasmic, consisting for ages of only such ac- 

 quaintance with the habits and structure of animals as the 

 hunter and the herdsman following them in the chase and 

 the field, and the priest and the householder cutting them 

 up for the altar and the table, would be likely to acquire, 

 and of such accounts of them as wondar and amazement 

 would be likely to suggest. Even after collections of their 

 varieties began to be made it was as objects of curiosity and 

 amusement rather than of study ; and in regard to their 

 very names, if it is not a puzzle as to how they were ob- 

 tained from their more waspy, bearish, and uncommunica- 

 tive owners, as it was to John Phenix how astronomers ever 

 got at those of the stars, it is one, certainly, as to which ani- 

 mals those used in its earlier books were really meant for, so 

 loose is their description. 



Aristotle (384-322 B. c.), that mountain mind which 

 caught on its brow so many of the beams of wisdom's rising 

 sun a thousand years before they touched the vales below, 

 was the first observer to look on animals with the really 

 scientific eye, describing minutely their wonderful varieties, 

 and, by his divisions of them into oviparous, viviparous, and 

 the like, recognizing the need, if not the method, of their 

 classification. It was a work in which Alexander the Great 

 was his friend and patron, putting at his service, it is said, 

 millions of money and thousands of men, specimens also of 

 all the new animals and plants found by him in the coun- 

 tries he ravaged ; and it is an interesting fact that while the 

 empires over men that the great Macedonian established 

 have long since passed away, and the glory that he won as a 

 warrior become only a blot on the page of history, the little 

 he did among the brutes was the founding of a kingdom 



