OUR SONG BIRDS 71 
not a few facts to support them more or less plausibly, but we 
do not think this the place to discuss others. Regarding the 
main thesis of Mrs. Calhoun we do not, moreover, pretend to 
make either adverse or favorable comment, as we dare not even 
hope to feel competent in expressing as much as a valuable opinion. 
On first reading of it, however, we were forcibly reminded 
of the opinions and theories and beliefs of the older scientists 
of the middle ages, nowadays called “dark ages,’’ more or less 
appropriately and truly, if not more likely, because we are at 
present so hopelessly ‘in the dark’ concerning the great men, 
and their great scientific attainments. It is fair to say that when- 
ever and wherever careful scientific observation without the 
aid of machines, microscopes and the like, were not indispensable, 
the great students of former ages even decades of centuries ago 
were as capable of careful investigation as we of to-day. True, 
their interpretation was often wrong, but they have often shown 
themselves our superior also, because looking only for truth and 
a solution of problems, they approached a subject with an un- 
prejudiced attitude of mind. There are, for instance, not many 
astronomers of to-day that could have made Galileo’s discoveries 
with his instruments and under similar restrictions. Theophrastus 
of Eresus several centuries before the Christian Era knew things 
about plants that we have been till very lately attributing to 
the discoverers of the seventeenth and eighteenth and nineteenth 
century. Many are still wont to consider that little of scientific 
value was done before the eighteenth century in biology, and 
that, the exponents of earlier ages were theorists and dreamers 
only. 
This condition of opinion may be due partly because few 
of our times can or do read the Greek or Latin treatises of the 
older scholars. I have heard it said that there are many scientists 
now flourishing doctor’s degrees that owing to lack of classical 
training not only would not compare with scholars of old, but 
would scarcely qualify for bachelor’s degrees in any European 
University of the ‘dark ages,’ whatever be the reason why the 
older masters of science are unknown there can at best be very 
poor excuses for the fact. 
In looking over a review of Mrs. Calhoun’s book, I remem- 
bered an old work of the thirteenth century printed in 1662 at 
Amsterdam, containing a theory not much unlike the present 
