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 May, 19o 7 ORNITHOLOGY FOR 'A STUDENT OF EVOLUTIONARY PROBLEMS 67 be done widely and accnrately. This sounds like platitnde to any of us so long as we listeu wholly from within the enclosure of our own specialties. Only when we look at some other fellow sweating away iu his field, do ve falter about admitting the demand without qualification. If I chance to be a cytologist or a chemical biologist I am prone to estimate lightly the worth of questions of priority in naming nexv species, or of descriptious of cretaceous diatoms. If I am absorbed in the folk- lore of Polynesian races, or the trees of North America, I am likely to be dubious about my colleague who spends his substance on cormting chromosomes in a cock- roaches' egg. But despite the diversity and narrowness of specialization, I am sure we are, especially in these last few years, coming to see more and more clearly, not only that all these things must be done and well done, but that by and by they work into one another's hands; that they more and more support one another, and lean upon one another, and that all together will finally make up a mag- nificent whole. My specific inquiry this evening is: Where is Ornithology to staud in the good time coming? What is it going to coutribute to the on-coming of the better day? How are its incomparable riches of observation and description to be worked into the larger biology? By whom is the vorking to be done? The last question may be first answered for it is easiest. It will have to be done largely by ornithologists themselves, and by those of exactly the stamp that has always been the fiber of the Cooper Club. I mean. ornithologists whose love for and knowledge of birds are in their very bones by reason of having entered there with their mother's milk almost; by reason of their having lived froin nursling days in mfinterrupted com- panionship with the birds. One of the foremost merits of ornithology is that its interest reaches so large a part of all there is to a bird. It studies the living bird as well as its dead remains. It regards the uest as well as the builder of it. The eggs and changing young are noted as well as the adult. The home, the food, the songs, the movements; the specific, even the personal, eccentricities are not ueglected. Just because birds, living, sing- ing, nesting, appeal above all. other objects in natnre, not even excepting flowers, to the unsophisticated heart as well as mind of ns humans, has this splendid store of knowledge been laid in. Formal, professional science, of necessity somewhat austere, is always inclined to look askance at sentiment and imagination, and hence to that in nature which specially allures these. The finger of caution is constantly raised against beauty as snch, in color and form and gracefulness of movement, and against illusive suggestion and comparison. But despite this generally wholesome restraiut, so compelling in these ways are some aspects of nature that they will uot be altogether let alone. If official science will not heed them, amateur science will. Thus ornithology, over and above the large place necessarily assigned to it in general zoology by the constituted jndiciary of the science, has ever been pre- eminently the amateur's field. And from the days of the Hon. Danais Barrington and Gilbert White, to say nothing of times antecedent to theirs, down to the present hour of the Cooper Club, knowledge of birds has come iu large measure xvithout professional sanction. And there is uo donbt that much of this knowledge not only could not have been garnered by official science, but would not have been even if it could, since it would not have been regarded as quite worth the while. Bnt now comes the highly significant thing. Official biology borne along by its own methods and results comes at length to see that it must have, with the rest, just the sort of data that amateur ornithology has been gleaning all these years. The Darwinian teuet that "varieties are incipient species" made the trivial k/rids of plants and animals glow with a significance they never before possessed,