BOOTLOGY. 
ONE cannot glance at the opening pages of any work 
on Zoology without being struck with the difficulty that 
naturalists experience in classifying the objects of their 
study. This difficulty arises from the fact of there being 
many animals whose organization presents characters which 
combine the peculiarities of different families or orders. 
The Flying Lemur (Galeopithecus volans) ofthe East Indies 
was for a long time considered to be a bat; modern anato- 
mists place it among the monkeys, and yet, according to 
some authorities, the grounds for its determination in the one 
case are as good as in the other. If the Galeopithecus, the 
monkeys and the bats originally appeared as we find them 
now, why should there be such a difficulty in determining 
their place in the Animal Kingdom? If, however, there has 
been an order of Galeopitheci, of which the present species 
are the only surviving representatives, and we regard these 
extinct forms as the common ancestors of the bats and the 
monkeys, we have an explanation of the peculiarities which 
are shared by these three orders: 
Bats. Galeopithecus. Monkeys. 
Ancestor. 
If the theory of the gradual transformation of animals be 
true, it is quite natural that we should find transitional 
(19) 
