158 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



afford its full quota of facts ; the distribution of extinct animals 

 can never be divorced from zoogeography. And now we come 

 to a more debatable consideration in the question whether the 

 principles of faunistic distribution can ever be completely founded 

 without a study of, and full reference to, the flora and its distri- 

 bution. A time must arrive, especially as we are even now all 

 considered to be in some sense more or less evolutionists, when 

 volumes described as devoted to the subject of "Natural History " 

 will not deal with zoology alone, omitting Homo, and discarding 

 the flora of the planet. Lastly, it is to be premised that in the 

 future the geological floor on which animals are dispersed, and 

 in which plants live, must receive the attention of students of 

 zoogeography. 



In relieving our minds from these cogitations we make no 

 complaint against the preparation of this excellent publication, 

 nor have we .a right to expect it to deal with subjects before 

 their time. The historian may arrive at some degree of finality, 

 but the scientific philosopher — never. To think otherwise is the 

 negation of the idea of an evolutionary progress in science. 



As an item of bibliography, it may be mentioned that Dr. 

 Sclater's paper "On the Distribution of Marine Mammalia," 

 read before the Zoological Society of London in 1897, was by a 

 happy accident first published in ' The Zoologist ' of that year 

 (p. 217). 



EDITOEIAL GLEANINGS. 



" AccoEDiNG to advices from the Caucasus, millions of singing 

 birds, which used every winter to find a warm retreat on the southern 

 slopes of the forest-clad mountains of the Caucasus, have suddenly 

 been surprised by the intense cold and severe snowstorms, whilst 

 they were on their way from the north. The sides of the mighty 

 mountains, the highest in Europe, and the shores of the Black 

 Sea, are now strewn with small corpses of singing birds, especially 

 Bullfinches, Goldfinches, Eedbreasts, Flycatchers, and other birds, 

 which in the summer mostly visit these shores." — Pall 31 all Gazette, 

 Feb. 14th, 1911. 



We annex the following extracts from "Gareth's" well-known 

 weekly contribution to the ' Eeferee ' (April 9th, 1911) : — 



" It is curious how often we find the keenest observers contradicting 



