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On order to obtain the best and also the most conservative information regarding this species, I appealed to the Curator of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, of the University of California. Although written in the mountain wilds, I promptly received the valuable contribution that appears below. As a clear, precise and conservative survey of an important species, it is really a model document.
It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down. "No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology," says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
Three years ago, on my return from Guatemala, I met in this city an English doctor named Castle, who has lived here for many years a man of scientific tastes and interests, who has employed his leisure in studying the botany, zoology, and indians of the district. He is well-informed, and one of the few persons acquainted with the Juaves.
For one of the higher nimbly and sweetly to recommend itself unto his gentle senses it had at least to retain certain rudimentary characteristics allying it to such "dragons of the prime" as toads and snakes. His scientific sympathies were distinctly reptilian; he loved nature's vulgarians and described himself as the Zola of zoölogy.
In zoology, for example, there is an immense number of uniformities ascertained, some of co-existence, others of succession, to many of which, notwithstanding considerable variations of the attendant circumstances, we know not any exception: but the antecedents, for the most part, are such as we can not artificially produce; or if we can, it is only by setting in motion the exact process by which nature produces them; and this being to us a mysterious process, of which the main circumstances are not only unknown but unobservable, we do not succeed in obtaining the antecedents under known circumstances.
Pine shelves nailed against the walls served for cases, and with a table or two for dissection this rough shelter was made to do duty as a kind of laboratory. The fact is worth noting, for here was the beginning of the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, now admitted to a place among the great institutions of its kind in the world.
I am now going to set before the public the names of certain institutions largely devoted to zoology and permeated by zoologists, which thus far seem to have entirely ignored the needs of our fauna, and which so far we know have contributed neither men, money nor encouragement to the Army of the Defense.
Don't talk of elephants in South America. Even in these days of Board schools " "Well," I interrupted, "any large South American animal a tapir, for example." "You may take it, young man, that I am versed in the elements of my business. This is not a conceivable bone either of a tapir or of any other creature known to zoology.
Great as have been the advances made by all the three branches of science, of old included under the title of natural history, there can be no doubt that zoology and botany have grown in an enormously greater ratio than mineralogy; and hence, as I suppose, the name of "natural history" has gradually become more and more definitely attached to these prominent divisions of the subject, and by "naturalist" people have meant more and more distinctly to imply a student of the structure and function of living beings.
There is not a fragment of the organism of this humble animal whose study would not lead us into regions of thought as large as those which I have briefly opened up to you; but what I have been saying, I trust, has not only enabled you to form a conception of the scope and purport of zoology, but has given you an imperfect example of the manner in which, in my opinion, that science, or indeed any physical science, may be best taught.
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