much the same spirit as that displayed by the
famous old lady who derived religious--instead of scientific--
consolation from the use of "the blessed word Mesopotamia."

The reason that it is worth while to enter this protest against Mr.
Haseman's style is because his work is of such real and marked value.
The pamphlet on the distribution of South American species shows that
to exceptional ability as a field worker he adds a rare power to draw,
with both caution and originality, the necessary general conclusions
from the results of his own observations and from the recorded studies
of other men; and there is nothing more needed at the present moment
among our scientific men than the development of a school of men who,
while industrious and minute observers and collectors and cautious
generalizers, yet do not permit the faculty of wise generalization to
be atrophied by excessive devotion to labyrinthine detail.

Haseman upholds with strong reasoning the theory that since the
appearance of all but the lowest forms of life on this globe there
have always been three great continental masses, sometimes solid
sometimes broken, extending southward from the northern hemisphere,
and from time to time connected in the north, but not in the middle
regions or the south since the carboniferous epoch. He holds that life
has been intermittently distributed southward along these continental
masses when there were no breaks in their southward connection, and
intermittently exchanged between them when they were connected in the
north; and he also upholds the view that from a common ancestral form
the same species has been often developed in entirely disconnected
localities when in these localities the conditions of environment were
the same.

The opposite view is that there have been frequent connections between
the great land masses, alike in the tropics, in the south temperate
zone, and in the Antarctic region. The upholders of this theory base
it almost exclusively on the distribution of living and fossil forms
of life; that is, it is based almost exclusively on biological and not
geological considerations. Unquestionably, the distribution of many
forms of life, past and present, offers problems which with our
present paleontological knowledge we are wholly unable to solve. If we
consider only the biological facts concerning some one group of
animals it is not only easy but inevitable to conclude that its
distribution must be acco