Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/172

166 —19 writers. The great work of Nutting on hydroids must be mentioned. Professor Nutting has made this subject very much his own, and was even able to go to Plymouth, England, and discover new forms under the eyes of the English zoologists.

—15 writers, three being Canadian.

—15 writers. This group is not receiving a fair share of attention.

So, on the whole, it appears that America is not seriously behind in zoology. Yet, I certainly cannot claim that the position of the science in this country is satisfactory. After all, the real question is, not whether we are doing as much as other people, but whether we are doing what we might, and ought. From this standpoint our deficiencies are serious enough. We are not, as yet, nearly able to cope with the work that lies ready to our hands. When the writer was a boy, he used to read and re-read such works as Wallace's 'Malay Archipelago,' and look forward to the time when he too would travel, and would discover something new. To-day, in New Mexico, he would undertake to find something new every day of the year, if he had no other occupation; and hardly a day passes in the laboratory without the determination of some new fact. But alas, thousands of specimens remain in closed boxes because there is nobody to work upon them; dozens of promising investigations are never undertaken because there is nobody to undertake them. Buildings, apparatus and books are well enough in their way; but the great need is for workers to make use of what is already gathered and ready for use, and to take up the threads of thought which flow from every investigation, and follow them to the end.

While we are seeking to add to the number of workers, something should also be said about their quality. Undoubtedly, there is too much narrowness, and too little general culture, an outward and visible sign of which is the bad Latin published by many of the younger men in the form of zoological names. At the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, there are sections of zoology, botany, geology, anthropology, etc., all in session simultaneously. The writer found it extremely annoying that he could not be in two or more places at the same time, but very few seemed to see any objection to the arrangement. This indicates limitations which must be regretted, and it is hard to believe that they are inevitable. When the zoologist ceases to know anything about the plants animals eat, or the physical environment in which they live, or even the animals of other groups than his own specialty, the broader ideas of biology will become obscured and evolution itself will cease to be intelligible, just as architecture is nothing to him who studies only single and isolated bricks.