Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/90

80 chambers are specially large in the male and most used in the breeding season. This Venezuelan frog, Rhinoderma Darwinii, seems to have only an enormous development of this resonance chamber converted to the singular purpose of harboring the young. As far as yet known, this frog leads the van of progress from the selfishness of the common frog to the altruism of the few; but there may remain to be discovered in tropical regions other frogs with structures and habits even more advantageous to the race and inconvenient to the individual.

Granting that all the above accounts of the breeding habits of frogs are reliable, they yet leave many details unknown. Very much remains to be found out before we can know the complete life histories of these remarkable creatures. Till we have a fuller knowledge, any attempt at explanation of the breeding habits and structures of these frogs would seem to be necessarily of a provisional nature.

Though it is difficult to describe these frogs without ascribing to them a far-seeing intelligence, the zoologist of to-day knows little ground for such assumption. Still less does he see in such examples of protection for the good of the race any direct acts of the Deity. He commonly interprets them as the results of the working of natural selection; and granting the potency of this means of evolution, the application to the above life-histories seems not difficult.

But it has been said that science is not concerned with the why, but only with the question, 'What is it precisely that does happen'" Shall we not work for more complete knowledge of the facts in the hope of a clearer view of the interconnection of organisms and environment?

May not our present attempts to understand such problems seem, in the future, as unscientific as does at present the fancy of the Japanese poet, who, centuries since, wrote:

"With hands resting on the ground, reverentially you repeat your poem, O Frog."