LIFE HISTORY STUDIES OF AmMALS.^ 



By Prof. L. 0. Miall, F. R. S. 



It has long- been my conviction that we study animals too much as 

 dead things. We name them, arrange them according to our notions 

 of their likeness or uulikeness, and record their distribution. Then per- 

 haps we are satisfied, forgetting that we could do as much with minerals 

 or remarkable boulders. Of late years we have attempted something 

 more; we now teach every student of zoology to dissect animals and to 

 attend to their development. This is, I believe, a solid and lasting 

 improvement. We owe it largely to Huxley, though it is but a revival 

 of the method of Bollinger, who may be judged, by the eminence of his 

 pui^ils and by the direct testimony of Baer, to have been one of the 

 very greatest of biological teachers. But the animals set before the 

 young zoologist are all dead; it is much if they are not pickled as well. 

 When he studies their development, he works chiefly or altogether 

 upon continuous sections, embryos mounted in balsam, and wax models. 

 He is rarely encouraged to observe live tadpoles or third-day chicks 

 with beating hearts. As for what Gilbert White calls the life and con- 

 versation of animals — how they defend themselves, feed, and make 

 love — this is commonly passed over as a matter of curious but not very 

 important information; it is not reputed scientific, or at least not 

 eminently scientific. 



Why do Ave study animals at all? Some of us merely want to gain 

 practical skill before attempting to master the structure of the human 

 body; others hope to qualify themselves to answer the questions of 

 geologists and farmers ; a very few wish to satisfy their natural curiosity 

 about the creatures which they find in the wood, the field, or the sea. 

 But surely our chief reason for studying animals ought to be that we 

 would know more of life, of the modes of growth of individuals and 

 races, of the causes of decay and extinction, of the adaptation of living 

 organisms to their surroundings. Some of us even aspire to know in 

 outline the course of life upon the earth, and to learn, or, failing that, 

 to conjecture, how life originated. Our own life is the thing of all 



'Address to the zoological section of the British Association for the Advancement 

 of Science. Toronto, 1897, by Prof. L. C. Miall, F. R. S., president of the section. 

 From Report of the British Association, 1897. 



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