440 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



Mr. Morley, after describing the many mental gifts and activities of 

 his master, went on to remark : — " No doubt something was left out in 

 the wide circle of his interests. Natural science, in all its speculations 

 and extensions and increase of scientific truth, extension of scientific 

 methods — all that, no doubt, constitute the central activities, the intel- 

 lectual activities, of England and Europe during the last forty years of 

 his life — to all that he was not entirely opened. I remember once 

 going with him one Sunday afternoon to pay a visit to Mr. Darwin. It 

 was in the seventies. As I came away, I felt that no impression had 

 reached him ; that that intellectual, modest, single-minded, low-browed 

 lover of truth — that searcher of the secrets of nature — had made no 

 impression on Mr. Gladstone's mind, that he had seen one who, from 

 his Kentish hill-top, was shaking the world." 



Mr. W. Eagle Clark, writing in the Aak (October last) states that 

 the occurrence of a third example of the so-called Mealy Redpoll in 

 the Island of Barra, one of the Outer Hebrides, incited him to procure 

 the specimens, with a view to ascertaining to what species or subspecies 

 of Acanthin the birds obtained in this far western island belonged. He 

 found that all three examples were referable to the form described by 

 Dr. Stejueger as Acanthh Unaria rostrata (Coues) — a bird not hitherto 

 recorded for Great Britain, though several specimens have been obtained 

 on islands off the west coast of Ireland. 



In the American Xaturalist for October last, Prof. W. M. Wheeler 

 has concluded his series of papers on " The Compound and Mixed 

 Nests of American Ants." The author has arrived at the same con- 

 clusion as Wasmann, that there are no evidences of ratiocination in 

 Ants, Prof. Wheeler, however, remarks that this conclusion, " even 

 if it be extended so as to exclude all animals except Man from a par- 

 ticipation in this faculty, does not imply the admission of a qualitative 

 difference between the human and animal psyche, as understood by 

 Wasmann. Surely the sciences of comparative physiology, anatomy, 

 and embryology, not to mention palaeontology, distribution, and taxo- 

 nomy, must have been cultivated to little purpose during the nine- 

 teenth century if we are to rest satisfied with the scholastic definition 

 of ratiocination as an adequate and final verity. And surely no one 

 who is conversant with modern biological science will accept the view 

 that the power of abstract, ratiocinative thought, which is absent in 

 infants and young children, scarcely developed in savages, and highly 

 developed and generally manifested only in the minority of civilized 

 man, has miraculously sprung into existence in full panoply like the 

 dausjhter of Jove." 



