May, 1907 ORNITHOLOGY FOR A STUDENT OF EVOLUTIONARY PROBLEMS 67 



be done widely and accurately. Tliis sounds like platitude to any of us so long as 

 we listen wholly from within the enclosure of our own specialties. Only when we 

 look at some other fellow sweating away in his field, do we falter about admitting 

 the demand without qualification. If I chance to be a cytologist or a chemical 

 biologist I am prone to estimate lightly the worth of questions of priority in naming 

 new species, or of descriptions of cretaceous diatoms. If I am absorbed in the folk- 

 lore of Polynesian races, or the trees of North America, I am likely to be dubious 

 about my colleague who spends his substance on counting chromosomes in a cock- 

 roaches' egg. But despite the diversity and narrowness of specialization, I am sure 

 we are, especially in these last few years, coming to see more and more clearly, not 

 only that all these things must be done and well done, but that by and by they 

 work into one another's hands; that they more and more support one another, 

 and lean upon one another, and that all together will finally make up a mag- 

 nificent whole. 



My.specific inquiry this evening is: Where is Ornithology to .stand in the good 

 time coming? What is it going to contribute to the on-coming of the better day? 

 How" are its incomparable riches of observation and description to be worked into 

 the larger biology? By whom is the working to be done? The last question may 

 be first answered for it is easiest. It will have to be done largely by ornithologists 

 themselves, and by those of exactly the stamp that has alwaj^s been the fiber of the 

 Cooper Club. I mean ornithologists whose lov^e for and knowledge of birds are 

 in their very bones by reason of having entered there with their mother's milk 

 almost; by rea.son of their having lived from niu-sling days in uninterrupted com- 

 panionship with the birds. 



One of the foremost merits of ornithology is that its interest reaches so large a 

 part of all there is to a bird. It studies the living bird as well as its dead remains. 

 It regards the nest as well as the builder of it. The eggs and changing young are noted 

 as well as the adult. The home, the food, the songs, the movements; the specific, 

 even the personal, eccentricities are not neglected. Just because birds, living, sing- 

 ing, nesting, appeal above all other objects in nature, not even excepting flowers, to 

 the unsophisticated heart as well as mind of us humans, has this splendid store of 

 knowledge been laid in. Formal, professional science, of necessity somewhat 

 austere, is always inclined to look askance at sentiment and imagination, and hence 

 to that in nature which specially allures these. The finger of caution is constantly 

 raised against beauty as such, in color and form and gracefulness of movement, and 

 against illusive suggestion and comparison. But despite this generally wholesome 

 restraint, so compelling in these ways are some aspects of nature that they will not 

 be altogether let alone. If official science will not heed them, amateur science will. 

 Thus ornithology, over and above the large place necessarily a.ssigned to it in 

 general zoolog}^ by the constituted judiciar\^ of the science, has ever been pre- 

 eminently the amateur's field. And from the days of the Hon. Danais Barrington 

 and Gilbert White, to say nothing of times antecedent to theirs, down to the 

 present hour of the Cooper Club, knowledge of birds has come in large measiu-e 

 without professional sanction. And there is no doubt that much of this knowledge 

 not only could not have been garnered by official science, but would not have been 

 even if it could, since it would not have been regarded as quite worth the while. 

 But now comes the highly significant thing. Official biolog_\' borne along by its 

 own methods and results comes at length to see that it must ha\-e, with the rest, 

 just the sort of data that amateur ornithology has been gleaning all these years. 



The Darwinian tenet that "varieties are incipient species" made the trivial 

 kijuis of plants and animals glow with a significance they never before possessed, 



