While you are making the leather ball strike the ceiling with resounding whacks, your dog, excited by the inspiring noise, bursts into the room, and interrupts your exercise with his enthusiastic morning greetings, expressed as energetically by his wagging tail as by his joyous barks and licks, all anticipatory of a lively morning run. He brings immediately into your mind the thought of still another division of science—zoölogy—to which you will devote many pleasant half-hours of reading, for it is full of most entertaining matter, as well as of matter calculated to awaken profound and useful thought concerning the relations of the many different members of the animal world to one another, and especially to their head and chief, man, to whom the supervision of the whole was, according to the Bible story, originally committed. Familiar as your dog may be to you, there are a hundred particulars of his family relationships, his descent from wild ancestors, etc., which can only become known to you through the studies that have been devoted to the science of zoölogy by curious-minded investigators from the times of Aristotle and Pliny down to our own day, when we have seen an ex-President of the United States wandering adventurously through some of the remotest portions of the inhabited globe, seeking fresh knowledge of, and personal acquaintance with, the rarer kinds of wild animals, and hunting down in their native wilds great beasts which the Cæsars used to admire from the security of the imperial seat, high above the bloody sands of the Roman arenas. And this modern ruler, after having laid down the political power intrusted to him by fellow citizens, found no occupation so attractive as that of adding something to the growing stores of science.
Painting, Chas. R. Knight. (American Museum of Natural History)
THE LITTLE EOHIPPUS. FROM WHICH THE MODERN HORSE DEVELOPED
ORNITHOLESTES—PREHISTORIC ANIMAL OF AMERICA
Photo, Metropolitan Museum