228 Zoology as Related to Evolution. 



ABSTRACT OF THE DISCUSSION. 



MR. JAMES A. SKILTON : 



In this instructive and delightful essay Mr. Kimball has again 

 shown, as he did in that delivered before the Association last year, 

 not only familiarity with the scientific side of his subject, but a unique 

 talent for the popular presentation of it ; and again he leaves little 

 if anything to be added, and nothing to be criticised. He has doubt- 

 less led every one of us to think of our animal pets, associates, and 

 friends of the present or of the past. It may not be improper, there- 

 fore, for me to offer, for you and for myself, some testimony in regard 

 to character as exhibited by animals. 



I have this evening had recalled to me the experiences of youth 

 beyond the teens, a time when servants had not yet usurped the 

 privileges and opportunities of the service of sons to fathers, and 

 when I had the constant, sometimes laborious, but always enjoyable, 

 companionship and charge of horses. Not all my teachers were as 

 good teachers as they. By their docility, fidelity, and obedience, and 

 by their exhibitions of endurance, power, and speed, they not only 

 taught me, by the Proebelish method of example, in the minor virtues, 

 but they sometimes fired my young imagination with a high sense of 

 the heroic. One among them was Prince by name and prince by 

 nature. It often became our joint duty to bring succor to the sick, 

 and more than once to bring life to the dying. He was a tall and 

 powerful dapple-gray of great speed and with a grand action touched 

 with something like refinement. A blow of a whip seemed to arouse 

 in him a sort of divine rage terrible to the beholder and combined 

 with a sense of unmerited dishonor and injustice impossible to be en- 

 dured, while a touch of caress was met first with a look and next with 

 a gentle nip, as much as to say : Please let me do my duty without 

 any petting and for the pleasure of that alone. 



In some subtle way he seemed to know how to gauge emergency, 

 and on our errands of mercy and succor, rushing through the streets, 

 there were times when, with that dancing white mane, proudly carried 

 tail, and grand air, he seemed to my boyish thought to have almost the 

 port and stride of an archangel. 



Even after he went blind as the result of hard work, he always 

 pressed straight forward in the harness, without faltering or turning 

 to either side, but with a sort of sublime trust in his driver, using his 



