Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/10

iv Other Orders of British animal life seem, so far as our pages are concerned, to excite small interest. We hope in future volumes that this cannot be said.

Another feature in 1901 has been a biographical element, or what we may venture to style a commencement of "patristic zoology." Thus we have had an appreciation of "Dante as a Naturalist," and a most interesting paper on "Early Ornithologists," written, alas! by an old contributor whose valued communications we shall never receive again.

Everywhere Zoology is an advancing science. This year the International Congress held its meeting at Berlin, while the publication of books relating to animal life is ever on the increase; and, though much of this literature may be of a compilative description, and designed for "popular" uses, it still proves that the reading public are not uninterested in the animal life around them. On all sides Zoology receives a fresh support. It is no longer the sluggard who is bid to study the way of the Ant, but the philosopher, and even the politician. Evolution has received its strongest credentials from Zoology, and Evolution is now a force recognized as much in the life of the city as in that of the fields. We can realize the past when the zoologist would be considered a "crank"; we well understand the modern equivalent of estimating the science as a "hobby"; but it only remains for zoologists to render it one of the factors in assisting to explain the mysteries of our own existence; and this may perhaps be best achieved by the bionomical method of ''