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266 the then still new doctrine of descent of Darwin, but a sure tact preserved him from the mistake of permitting it to have any influence on his great work. The prospectus also gives information on this subject; for be says at the close of it, in the name of the publisher: "The question will come up with every one of what will be the attitude of this work toward the movement of our time which is leaving away behind itself the mark of exact research, and is losing its head in the regions of speculation. On this subject it is proper to remark that the author has not followed this movement in the present work; that he has kept aloof from the strifes of the learned and from brilliant conjectures; and in the well-understood interest of the layman, who will seek instruction through him, he has confined himself to demonstrated facts and established observations. No one, therefore, need fear that his faith or conscience will be damaged, or that he will have reason to be afraid on account of his similarity with monkeys." Brehm was also aware that he must in his treatise abandon the region of the systematic in which all other text-books of zoölogy were cast. "With the abandonment of the sterile domain of the systematic," he says again in his prospectus, "a rich field of observation has opened out before the eye of the naturalist." But be well understood that he could not include everything with this one-sided view, and knew that the naturalist could not be a fast-bound teacher, but must lead the life of a hunter and wanderer, as he himself had done till then. He considers expressly, in the preface to the second series of his "Thierleben," the manner in which readers will have to judge it: "The 'Thierleben' is not afraid of a stringent criticism. Whoever seeks in it what the title and the opening pages will justify him in looking for will not find himself deceived; for, if he will always keep the title in mind, he will not seek there for what he can not find." He was so fortunate as to have the aid, in preparing his first edition, of the gifted animal-painter Robert Kretschmer, of Leipsic. The two men were well acquainted with each other. They had both been attached to the Abyssinian expedition, Kretschmer as its artist; and the water-color illustrations of it, painted on the spot, which he brought home with him, are among the most beautiful of their kind. Brehm was, therefore, quite right in calling his first edition an illustrated "Thierleben"; those fresh, lively pictures, painted with such grasping perception and freedom from restraint, contributed greatly to pave its way to the public; without them, the success of the book, notwithstanding its excellent contents, would have been much smaller. Brehm wrote the first five volumes of his book between 1863 and 1868, while Oskar Schmidt and C. L. Taschenberg prepared the sixth volume, containing invertebrates. A second edition, in ten volumes, was published in 1868, and the following years. The great pains with which the whole work was gradually pushed to completion bore good fruit, and, when we state that the book was translated into most of the living literary languages, it is not