suggested by the word "evolution" and the names of Darwin and Wallace. To have a true classificatory system seems to be, now, the grand ideal of the naturalist, and this, I suppose, must be called a high one, though it is wonderful how, in some modern works, the soul of it has been taken out of the body, so that all has become dull and pedantic again, though a flight of stairs higher up than some fifty years ago. Thus can a matter seem rich or poor as one or another treats of it. But habits and instincts are as strongly inherited as structure, so that, as it appears to me, the study of life is, even from the orthodox scientific point of view, as important as the study of death. Yet it is death that most zoologists (as they call themselves) really revel in, and, though they may not say so, one cannot help feeling that they are a great deal happier and more comfortable dissecting a body in their study than studying a life out-of-doors.
Even admitting that both ways of acquiring knowledge are equally efficacious and legitimate, yet this is very clear, that the destruction of any species ends both, in regard to it. We can no more dissect the great auk or the dodo (or blow their eggs) now than we can observe their habits. Thus it is not only beauty, but knowledge also—how great and how varied who can say?—that is being every day drained out of the world, and against this there is, as it seems to me, an insufficient protest on the part of scientific men as a body. They care too little about it. When they think of birds or beasts, it is under glass cases in museums that their mind's eye sees them, and if there is only a specimen—nay, a
