Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 6 (1902).djvu/59

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have tried in the following book to write an elementary treatise on Zoology which could readily be understood by a student who had no previous knowledge of the subject." This is the opening sentence of the preface. The word Zoology "denotes the science which concerns itself with animals, endeavouring to find out what they are, and how they came into being," is the definition given in the introduction. These two statements may be taken as admirable texts to a volume which should be in the hands of those many naturalists who are not in the strict sense zoologists.

After discussing the "fundamental" difference between animals and plants, which after all is perhaps less fundamental than relative, we come to a most pregnant sentence, which will well bear repetition and remembrance: "Since we can never learn much about the consciousness of beings with whom we cannot speak, zoologists content themselves with looking at animals entirely from the outside, without enquiring as to whether or no they are conscious." We believe that a communication with animal life will be the great zoological discovery of the future, though at present scarcely a single experiment is being made to aid a work which, like meteorology, can only make a start on the results of experiments and observations continuously made, and frequently verified. The very statement of our disability through this cause to really understand other animal life than our own is at once a mark of progress.

In reading these pages one cannot but appreciate the loss to bionomics that accrues by the neglect of observations on many lower forms of life. If we except the Phylum Arthropoda and the higher vertebrates, we shall find this volume describing Zool. 4th ser. vol. VI., January, 1902.