EDITORIAL GLEANINGS.
The opening passage of Prof. L.C. Miall's Address to Section D. (Zoology) at the recent meeting of the British Association at Toronto will receive the hearty approval of most readers of 'The Zoologist':—"It has long been my conviction that we study animals too much as dead things. We name them, arrange them according to our notions of their likeness or unlikeness, and record their distribution. Then perhaps we are satisfied, forgetting that we could do as much with minerals or remarkable boulders. Of late years we have attempted something more; we now teach every student of zoology to dissect animals, and to attend to their development. This is, I believe, a solid and lasting improvement; we owe it largely to Huxley, though it is but a revival of the method of Dollinger, who may be judged by the eminence of his pupils, and by the direct testimony of Baer, to have been one of the very greatest of biological teachers. But the animals set before the young zoologist are all dead; it is much if they are not pickled as well. When he studies their development he works chiefly or altogether upon continuous sections, embryos mounted in balsam, and wax models. He is rarely encouraged to observe live tadpoles or third-day chicks with beating hearts. As for what Gilbert White calls the life and conversation of animals, how they defend themselves, feed, and make love, this is commonly passed over as a matter of curious but not very important information; it is not reputed scientific, or at least not eminently scientific."
Dr. D.G. Elliot has contributed to the Zoological Series of the Field Columbian Museum, Chicago, a List of Mammals from Somali-land, obtained by the Museum's East African Expedition. One observation bears witness to the danger of a solely museum knowledge of an animal. Madoqua phillipsi, Thomas (Phillips's Dik-Dik), has a remarkable peculiarity in "the immense deposit in the antorbital vacuity of a black pigment, which stains everything it touches. It forms a swelling just in front of the eye, and from its jet-black colour and considerable size makes a very conspicuous mark. No trace of this exists in the skin, and as the skull shows a cavity at this point, no one would imagine that there would here be a prominence on the face instead of a depression. The lack of knowledge of such facts as this causes the mounted specimens in museums
