184 



NATUBAL SCIENCE NEWS. 



PENIKESE— A Reminiscence. 



By One of its Pupils. 



Copyright secured 1895. 



river. In this he hatched the fish in sixty hours. At 

 first they were small and greatly resembled the larvae 

 of mosquitoes. When let into the stream they im- 

 mediately sought the middle of the river. Trout and 

 salmon seeking the banks. As they descended they 

 grew rapidly. In two years time they returned as 

 chicken shad; perfect males and females, and market- 

 able. They go down the river in September. They 

 do not migrate, as many would suppose, but the fish 

 from each river keep distinct. The fisherman tell, 

 by the intensity of color, what waters they are from. 

 They appear in Savannah, Georgia, in February; in 

 Washington, D. C, in March; in Massachusetts, in 



J une> 



The eggs of fishes differ in size. In the trout and 

 salmon there are about 1,000 eggs to the pound; in 

 shad, 30,000; in some larger fish, as many as 70,000. 

 Some fishes cannot be bred artificially — it then be- 

 comes necessary to transfer live breeders. These 

 generally lay their eggs, not in mass but singly. 

 The fish themselves must be delicately handled, as a 

 damage to their skins usually results in death. Black 

 bass will grow to a weight of thirty-five to thirty-six 

 pounds. They were transported from Saratoga Lake 

 in 1850. They must be kept in water of a certain 

 temperature, the water being frequently changed. 

 Trout can be transported to a great distance. Fish 

 are transported from water to water by fish-ways. 

 The greatest enemy of the trout is the pickerel." 



CHAPTER VIII. 



Morse vs. Putnam on Evolution; The Eni>. 



It was during this second year's course at Per.ikese 

 Island, that the lectures upon evolution by Professor 

 Morse and arguments against that theory, by others of 

 the professors, formed a distinctive feature of our in- 

 struction. 



Professor Morse was evidently an ardent evolution- 

 ist, — at least one would judge so from his lectures 

 and personal conversation upon the subject. He 

 gave us many interesting talks upon it — and seemed 

 to have no patience with any one who did not think 

 as he thought, or believe as he believed regarding it. 

 Some of his oft-repeated and apparently pet expres- 

 sions were: 'As you culminate in any group, you 

 find features similar to those of the higher verte- 

 brates," or, "there are no forms but that, in their cul- 

 mination, point to the vertebrates;" still again, "cer- 

 tain parts of the mollusks show a resemblance to 

 man, — as, for example, the eye and nerve ganglion, 

 protected by a form covering, suggests the skull." 



I well remember how once the professor illustrated 

 the progression of animal life from the lowest inverte- 

 brate to the highest vertebrate by an admirable, sys- 

 tematic tree of trunk, branches, and twigs, even, 

 shooting here and there all over the blackboard, and 

 ended by declaring the precepts of the evolution of 

 man from all this treey and twigy matter. Unfortu- 

 nately, however, man was made to appear at the ex- 

 tremity of one of these insignificant branchlets. As a 

 result — during the evening of the same day, the figure 

 remaining upon the board during that time, some 

 mischievious person made, naturally enough as far as 

 simple appearances went, a few additional branchlets 

 to the limb of man with the words "man in 1900?" 

 One can imagine the scene which followed upon the 

 discovery of the marks: the consternation of the pro- 



fessor, and the good-natured raillery of the scholars. 

 But this did not deter him from further lectures upon 

 the subject; or we, who listened, from asking our- 

 selves, like Pilate of old "what is truth" in this mat- 

 ter. 



Of course not all who heard his lectures fully 

 agreed with Professor Morse in everything which he 

 said, — in fact, I am of the opinion that the majority 

 rather sided against than in favor of his theories; yet, 

 personally, he was a great favorite with everyone, and 

 was greeted with a perfect storm of applause when- 

 ever he appeared amongst us — nor will we soon for- 

 get the apparent interest and enthusiasm with which 

 he always ehtered upon his subject, — nor was that in- 

 terest weakened, in either instructor or pupil, to the 

 end. 



I will now give you the substance, as fully and as 

 clearly as my notes will allow, of Dr. Morse's most 

 important arguments in favor of the theories of evolu- 

 tion and natural selection. He began as follows: — 



"I come before you tonight, to say a few words 

 upon a subject quite foreign to my usual one — the 

 molluscous branch of the invertebrate kingdom. It 

 is one which I think ought to be presented to you in 

 a fair way, as it is one which is now agitating the 

 whole world. I will not ask you to believe the evi- 

 dence to be set forth against your better judgments; 

 but I ask your attention while I explain, and lay be- 

 fore you, the views which are held by those who are 

 supporters of the evolution theory, and supporters of 

 Mr. Darwin; and I think you will see that it is not so 

 terrible a thing to suppose man originated from a 

 branch of the lower or animal kingdom, or, in other 

 words, from the ape, after all. 



"It is well known that all animals, in some form or 

 other, — either in their 'adult or in their embryonic 

 stages — resemble other animals, higher or lower, in 

 their adult or embryonic stages; and that all classes 

 have forms that are almost impossible to be separated 

 from, or are intermediate between, two kingdoms: 

 For instance, — many of the lower forms of polyzoa 

 cannot be definitely separated from many of the alga 

 or seaweeds, which, at a certain period of growth, 

 throw out free forms having small bodies with a tail 

 at each end, and which move about freely in the 

 water. Thus the two forms, the animal and the 

 plant, are so similar that a definite study of each is 

 absolutely necessary in order to separate them with 

 any degree of satisfaction — if not at all. Such a 

 study has not as yet been made, — and, undoubtedly, 

 when it is made, many errors in our belief concerning 

 them will be corrected, if not our whole classification 

 of them altered. Then, too, we have many animals 

 in the insect or articulate branch, which insensibly 

 run into each other and into others of other branches, 

 — these are so closely allied as to be almost insepar- 

 able if not quite so. Now to what does all this tend? 



"Many of the old scholars of science classified the 

 animal kingdom in such a way that there were no in- 

 termediate forms — by placing the doubtful genera and 

 species in separate and distinct groups; thus repre- 

 senting the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms by 

 separate and distinct groups, also. But we see, now, 

 that this is contrary to their general structure, and 

 opposed to true classification. If we represent the 

 old classification by a series of straight lines, we 

 shall have a good illustration of the relation of the 

 old orders (or, better, branches) to each other; or 

 even if the lines were placed in an inclined direction, 

 one line being above the other, we shall still have a 

 (To be continued.) 



