Sir John Lubbock's presidential address at the International Congress of
Zoologists opened on Tuesday at Cambridge, though brief, was both illuminating and suggestive. The keynote of the address was struck in the remark that we were still only on the threshold of the temple of science, our ignorance being illustrated by a number of curious illustra- tions taken from the life-history of such familiar animals and insects as the common eel and the fly of the King Charles oak- apple. Our ignorance of the senses of animals makes it possible that the familiar world which surrounds us may be to them full of music which we cannot hear, of colours which we cannot see, of sensations which we cannot conceive. As to the mental condition of animals, Sir John proclaimed him- self unable to reconcile himself to the view that they are mere exquisite automata. He also declared that wonderful results might be achieved if we could stop the enormous ex- penditure on engines for the destruction of life and property, and spend even the thousandth part on scientific progress. Apart from this, he complained that more students would doubtless have devoted themselves to science "if it were not so systematically repressed in our schools : if boys and girls were not given the impression that the field of discovery is well-nigh exhausted." Sir John Lubbock is, we think, un- duly hard on schoolmasters. He forgets the sort of social stigma that in the estimation of most English schoolboys has always attached to " stinks " and "bugs and beetles."
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