Maech 21, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



453 



been, inevitably, both result and cause of the 

 •wonderful progress that has gone on. Surely 

 there is neither possibility nor desire to return 

 to the conditions of a half-century ago. But 

 a certain quality or attitude of mind essential, 

 according to the reviewer's notion, to the best 

 achievements has been lost since the former 

 days. Reference may be made to what some 

 astronomer. Professor Hale I believe, has ex- 

 tolled as the amateur spirit in science: a spon- 

 taneous, perennial curiosity; a wide-awakeness 

 of perception; an openness of mind; and a 

 nimbleness of imagination, as touching all 

 sorts of objects and processes and incidents in 

 one's surroundings. The belief prevails 

 widely among biologists of the present day 

 that this sort of thing necessarily begets 

 superficiality — that it is inimical to that pro- 

 fundity demanded by the deep, ultimate prob- 

 lems which constitute the soul of science. 

 The belief is, however, not justified by either 

 the history of scientific discovery, or our mod- 

 ern knowledge of the constitution and work- 

 ings of the human mind. The " complex " of 

 recent psychology is a " system of connected 

 ideas with a strong emotional tone " ; and 

 si)ecialization may go so far in both differen- 

 tiation and intensification as to tend to re- 

 duce the system of ideas to one idea, and to 

 destroy the "emotional tone." 



Such works as the one now before us, taken 

 in their entirety, ought to serve the two-fold 

 end of helping on knowledge in a restricted 

 field of zoology, and of restoring to biological 

 research something of the amateur spirit. 



Wm. E. Eitteh 



List of North American Land Mammals in 

 the United States National Museum, 1911. 

 By Gerrit S. Miller, Jr., Curator, Divi- 

 sion of Mammals, United States National 

 Museum. Bulletin 79, United States Na- 

 tional Museum. Washington, Government 

 Printing Office. 1912. 8vo. Pp. xiv-f 

 455. 



This volume is a most welcome contribution 

 to mammalogical literature, giving, as it does, 

 in systematic sequence, the names of the spe- 

 cies and subspecies of all North American 



land mammals currently recognized down to 

 the end of the year 1911, and a large part of 

 those described during 1912. " North Amer- 

 ica," for the purpose of the list, comprises 

 " the entire continent from Panama north- 

 ward, together with Greenland and the Greater 

 and Lesser Antilles." It consequently includes 

 the Island of Trinidad, which is, faunally and 

 geographically, really South American. Ac- 

 cording to the author's tabular summary, the 

 number of " forms " included in the list is 

 2,138, of which 1,955 are represented in the 

 United States National Museum, leaving only 

 183 as unrepresented. The types of about one 

 half of the total number of forms are in the 

 National Museum. 



The plan of the list is about as follows: 

 The classification, or " sequence of groups is, 

 in its main features, that adopted by Osborn 

 in his ' Age of Mammals,' 1910, though the 

 arrangement of the families and genera has 

 been revised to make it as consistently as pos- 

 sible in harmony with that of the higher 

 groups." References are given to the place 

 of first publication of all generic, specific and 

 subspecific names, and types are designated 

 for the genera. In the case of species and 

 subspecies, reference is usually made to the 

 first use of the binomial or trinomial here 

 adopted, and to True's list of 1885. " The 

 type locality of each form is stated with all 

 possible exactitude; and in revised genera the 

 ranges are given as printed by the author," 

 references to such revisions being given in 

 footnotes. 



The list includes : (1) species and subspecies 

 that " had not been questioned in some recent 

 work of definite monographic character " prior 

 to the end of the year 1911; (2) forms be- 

 longing to groups which have not been treated 

 in a monographic paper; and in cases where 

 differences of opinion regarding their status 

 have developed, " references are given to the 

 conflicting views," at least in most cases. 

 The utility of this work to investigators is 

 further enhanced by an asterisk prefixed to 

 the names of forms contained in the National 

 Museum, and also a dagger in case the mu- 

 seum also has the type. The author has of 



