A BIOLOGICAL FORECAST 301 



when you start you think your breakfast will last all day, becomes of vital 

 importance about the time the sun is directly over your head, when you will 

 devour every crumb, and, like poor Oliver, cry for more. Carry a little india- 

 rubber, leather or tin drinking-cup with you but don't put much water inside 

 of you — it is deleterous during these tramps; once give way to the temptation 

 of guzzling creek water and by the time you are ready to drag yourself home, 

 you will be as near a gone case of foundering as any undertaker need delight 

 to see. If you feel thirsty smoke segars, if you can't smoke moisten your lips 

 with a little lemon-juice or whisky, but don't moisten with too much of the 

 latter so that the last seen of you is adorning the corner of some fence, with the 

 flies hovering around your mouth trying to ascertain whether it was "Mountain 

 Dew" or "Lavan's Best Proof" that has put you in a position for your friends 

 to be ashamed of you, sir. 



How detailed and considerate the instructions are ! That these old 

 naturalists were proud of their outfits, we can judge from the fact that 

 Linnaeus, the passed master of them all, had his portrait painted in his 

 Lapland collecting costume. There are many descendants of these 

 worthies at this board to-night, but where among us is a single repre- 

 sentative. As Joseph Jefferson once said in describing his own person, 

 we find ourselves disguised in the clothes of gentlemen, and no one 

 here this evening has moistened his lip with " Mountain Dew," not to 

 mention lemon-juice. 



But what did these old masters do for us? They undertook and 

 partly performed the enormous task of delivering to us a descriptive 

 catalogue of the animals and plants of the world. To be sure this 

 seemed a simpler proposition in the old days when, as Linnaeus declared, 

 there were as many species as had been created in the beginning. But 

 even then the number must have seemed considerable, for Linnaeus him- 

 self gave us descriptions of over four thousand species of animals. Prob- 

 ably, however, he had no suspicion that the total of described animals 

 alone was to rise in our day to half a million and even after this heavy 

 draft, nature would still have the appearance of inexhaustibleness. 



But nature is not only vastly richer in species than the older natural- 

 ists probably suspected ; she is continually at work creating new forms. 

 The simple faith of Linnaeus in the special creation of animals and 

 plants was forever overthrown by Darwin, whose " Origin of Species " 

 established a new point of view for this whole question. And recent 

 evolutionary work has shown that organic transformation is not only 

 in progress to-day, as it has been in the past, but, in the hands of man, 

 it is rapidly assuming the aspect of an important element in civilization. 

 Within the last few years such mastery has been gained over the factors 

 controlling the color of the hair of some of our smaller and more rapidly 

 breeding mammals that, within reasonable limits, a pure breed of guinea 

 pigs of a previously designated color, for instance, can be produced in 

 an incredibly short time. And when it is kept in mind that some of 

 the colors thus produced had long been sought in vain by the old- 



