Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/468

440 Mr. Morley, after describing the many mental gifts and activities of his master, went on to remark:—"No doubt something was left out in the wide circle of his interests. Natural science, in all its speculations and extensions and increase of scientific truth, extension of scientific methods—all that, no doubt, constitute the central activities, the intellectual activities, of England and Europe during the last forty years of his life—to all that he was not entirely opened. I remember once going with him one Sunday afternoon to pay a visit to Mr. Darwin. It was in the seventies. As I came away, I felt that no impression had reached him; that that intellectual, modest, single-minded, low-browed lover of truth—that searcher of the secrets of nature—had made no impression on Mr. Gladstone's mind, that he had seen one who, from his Kentish hill-top, was shaking the world."

, writing in the Auk (October last) states that the occurrence of a third example of the so-called Mealy Redpoll in the Island of Barra, one of the Outer Hebrides, incited him to procure the specimens, with a view to ascertaining to what species or subspecies of Acanthis the birds obtained in this far western island belonged. He found that all three examples were referable to the form described by Dr. Stejneger as Acanthis linaria rostrata (Coues)—a bird not hitherto recorded for Great Britain, though several specimens have been obtained on islands off the west coast of Ireland.

the American Naturalist for October last, Prof. W.M. Wheeler has concluded his series of papers on "The Compound and Mixed Nests of American Ants." The author has arrived at the same conclusion as Wasmann, that there are no evidences of ratiocination in Ants.Prof. Wheeler, however, remarks that this conclusion, "even if it be extended so as to exclude all animals except Man from a participation in this faculty, does not imply the admission of a qualitative difference between the human and animal psyche, as understood by Wasmann. Surely the sciences of comparative physiology, anatomy, and embryology, not to mention palæontology, distribution, and taxonomy, must have been cultivated to little purpose during the nineteenth century if we are to rest satisfied with the scholastic definition of ratiocination as an adequate and final verity. And surely no one who is conversant with modern biological science will accept the view that the power of abstract, ratiocinative thought, which is absent in infants and young children, scarcely developed in savages, and highly developed and generally manifested only in the minority of civilized man, has miraculously sprung into existence in full panoply like the daughter of Jove."