PRACTICAL IMPORTANCE OF ZOOLOGY 11 



eaters, but the leading dominating races of mankind who are 

 in the van of the march of culture have always been flesh- 

 eaters. Primitive man also was a hunter and a flesh-eater, 

 and civilised man in moments of relaxation throws off the 

 shackles of civilisation and becomes a hunter again. Now the 

 scientific breeding and care of cattle is a branch of applied 

 zoology, and one that is growing in importance. So long as 

 one was concerned merely with the raising of cattle in old 

 civilised countries like our own, in which through centuries 

 of trial and error traditional rules had been hammered out, 

 the agriculturist got on fairly well without zoology, but when 

 cattle-breeding was begun in new countries where conditions are 

 widely different from home conditions, then the necessity of 

 a knowledge of zoological science became clamant. Frozen 

 meat imported into the London docks was found to be 

 marked by circular scars, caused by the presence of a worm 

 which lay coiled up therein, and the question arose, was such 

 meat dangerous for human consumption or not] Only the 

 zoologist could answer this question, and the answer he gave 

 was that the eggs of this worm pass through a necessary part 

 of their development in the body of a fly which is not found 

 in Great Britain, and hence that the meat infested by these 

 worms could be consumed with impunity. Again, the sea 

 furnishes us with a large part of our animal food. In 1897 

 it was reckoned that the produce of the Canadian fisheries, im- 

 perfectly exploited though these were, exceeded in value the 

 famous Manitoba wheat-harvest. The question, whether we 

 are exhausting our fisheries or not, has been raised again and 

 again. When the steam trawler with its improved fishing 

 gear was introduced, a cry arose from the longshore fishermen 

 that their new rivals were ruining fisheries by destroying the 

 spawn. The zoologist was the only person who could settle 

 this dispute, and he did so by showing that the spawn of 

 most of the valuable fishes floated and was quite out of the 

 reach of the trawls of the new fishing-boats. In the future 

 we confidently anticipate that zoology will be more and 

 more applied to the scientific exploitation of the " harvest of 

 the sea." 



But in our opinion the greatest value of zoology is to be 

 found in another aspect of its teaching. As we study the 



