United States or Kiribati ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Near the top of the ridge we found the unmistakable tracks of the bongo. This is interesting to zoologists in that it extends the southward range of this rare and shy beast. Just at dark we regained our camp.

"The theory of evolution," writes the Professor, "is now universally accepted by zoologists and botanists, and it is applied unreservedly to man. Some question, indeed, whether it fits his soul, but all agree it accounts for his body.

Given in any species, the proportions found to exist among the bones, and we may, and zoologists do, predict from any one, the dimensions of the rest; just as, when knowing the proportions subsisting among the parts of a geometrical figure, we may, from the length of one, calculate the others.

Again, if we examine the contents of the earth's crust, we shall find in the latter of those deposits, which have served as the great burying grounds of past ages, numberless lobster-like animals, but none so similar to our living lobster as to make zoologists sure that they belonged even to the same genus.

BEES BENEFICIAL TO FRUIT. Dr. A. Packard, editor of the American Naturalist, replies to a query in regard to the effects produced upon fruit by the agency of honey bees, that all the evidence given by botanists and zoologists who have specially studied the subject, shows that bees improve the quality and tend to increase the quantity of fruit.

The venado of Cubagua belongs to one of those numerous species of small American deer, which zoologists have long confounded under the vague name of Cervus mexicanus. It does not appear to be the same as the hind of the savannahs of Cayenne, or the guazuti of Paraguay, which live also in herds. Its colour is a brownish red on the back, and white under the belly; and it is spotted like the axis.

In Sahalin there is very good fish, but there are no hot drinks.... Our geologists, ichthyologists, zoologists and so on, are fearfully uneducated people. They write such a vile jargon that it not only bores one to read it, but one actually has at times to remodel the sentences before one can understand them; on the other hand, they have solemnity and earnestness enough and to spare.

I would say only that the non-transmission of racial mutilations, negative breeding experiments upon mutilated rats and mice, the results of further study of supposedly transmitted immunity to poisons that all these have led zoölogists to render the verdict of "not proved."

Jena is Jena to-day not so much because Guericke and Fichte and Hegel and Schiller and Oken taught here in the past, as because it has for thirty-eight years been the seat of the labors of Germany's greatest naturalist, one of the most philosophical zoologists of any country or any age, Professor Ernst Haeckel.

Botany had in those days received a new impulse from the great conceptions of Goethe. The metamorphosis of plants was the chief study of my friends, and I could not but feel that descriptive zoology had not spoken the last word in our science, and that grand generalizations, such as were opening upon botanists, must be preparing for zoologists also.