Did you hear that two rabbits escaped from the zoo and so far they have
Once there was a marine biologist who loved dolphins. He spent his time trying to feed and protect his beloved creatures of the sea. One day, in a fit of inventive genius, he came up with a serum that would make dolphins live forever! Of course he was ecstatic. But he soon realized that in order to mass produce this serum he would need large amounts of a certain compound that was only found in nature in the metabolism of a rare South American bird. Carried away by his love for dolphins, he resolved that he would go to the zoo and steal one of these birds. Unbeknownst to him, as he was arriving at the zoo an elderly lion was escaping from its cage. The zookeepers were alarmed and immediately began combing the zoo for the escaped animal, unaware that it had simply lain down on the sidewalk and had gone to sleep. Meanwhile, the marine biologist arrived at the zoo and procured his bird. He was so excited by the prospect of helping his dolphins that he stepped absentmindedly stepped over the sleeping lion on his way back to his car. Immediately, 1500 policemen converged on him and arrested him for transporting a myna across a staid lion for immortal porpoises.
Did you hear that two rabbits escaped from the zoo and so far they have only recaptured 116 of them?
Cecil, you're my final hope Of finding out the true Straight Dope For I have been reading of Schrodinger's cat But none of my cats are at all like that. This unusual animal (so it is said) Is simultaneously alive and dead! What I don't understand is just why he Can't be one or the other, unquestionably. My future now hangs in between eigenstates. In one I'm enlightened, in the other I ain't. If *you* understand, Cecil, then show me the way And rescue my psyche from quantum decay. But if this queer thing has perplexed even you, Then I will *___and* I won't see you in Schrodinger's zoo. -- Randy F., Chicago, "The Straight Dope, a compendium of human knowledge" by Cecil Adams
Welcome to the Zoo!
A Local Museum should be exactly what its name implies, viz., "Local"--illustrating local Geology, local Botany, local Zoology, and local Archaeology.
All I know is that I'm tired of being clever Everybody's clever these days Take a win Take a fall I never wanted your love But I needed it all
To my mind, the expression of divinity is in variety, and the more variable the creation, the more variable the creatures that surround us, botanical and zoological, the more chance we have to learn and to see into life itself, nature itself. … we need variety. We came from that, we were born from that, it's our world, the world in which we became what we have become.
Neither woman nor man, nor any kind of creature in the universe, was born for the exclusive, or even the chief, purpose of falling in love or being fallen in love with.... Except the zoophytes and coral insects of the Pacific Ocean, I am acquainted with no creature with whom it is the one or grand object.
On the face of the matter it is not obvious that the brilliant poet had less chance of doing good service in natural science than the dullest of dissectors and nomenclators. Indeed, as I have endeavoured to indicate, there was considerable reason, a hundred years ago, for thinking that an infusion of the artistic way of looking at things might tend to revivify the somewhat mummified body of technical zoology and botany. Great ideas were floating about; the artistic apprehension was needed to give these airy nothings a local habitation and a name; to convert vague suppositions into definite hypotheses. And I apprehend that it was just this service which Goethe rendered by writing his essays on the intermaxillary bone, on osteology generally, and on the metamorphoses of plants.
I somehow see what's beautiful In things that are ephemeral. I'm my only friend of mine, And love is just a piece of time In the world In the world. And I couldn't help but fall in love again.
The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognizable to the common sight, but where an expert eye finds always traces of the prior work of the past centuries.
Ethnology, as thus defined, is a branch of Anthropology, the great science which unravels the complexities of human structure; traces out the relations of man to other animals; studies all that is especially human in the mode in which man's complex functions are performed; and searches after the conditions whicn have determined his presence IN the world. And Anthropology is a section of Zoology, which again is the animal half of Biology--the science of life and living things.
Such is the position of ethnology, such are the objects of the ethnologist. The paths or methods, by following which he may hope to reach his goal, are diverse. He may work at man from the point of view of the pure zoologist, and investigate the anatomical and physiological peculiarities of Negroes, Australians, or Mongolians, just as he would inquire into those of pointers, terriers, and turnspits,--"persistent modifications" of man's almost universal companion. Or he may seek aid from researches into the most human manifestation of humanity-Language; and assuming that what is true of speech is true of the speaker--a hypothesis as questionable in science as it is in ordinary life--he may apply to mankind themselves the conclusions drawn from a searching analysis of their words and grammatical forms.
An quidquid stultius, quam quos singulos contemnas, eos aliquid putare esse universos?=--Can there be any greater folly than the respect you pay to men collectively when you despise them individually? _Cic._ [Greek: Anthropos on tout' isthi kai memnes' aei]--Being a man, know and remember always that thou art one. _Philemon Comicus._ [Greek: Anthropos physei zoon politikon]--Man is by nature an animal meant for civic life.
My goal as an actor is always to be as truthful as possible, and to find the truth in the material I am representing. So I think that its the same with performing music. But in a way, performing your own music, its easier to find the truth in it, because its coming from yourself. Theres no translation needed.
Around the turn of this century, a composer named Camille Saint-Saens wrote a satirical zoological-fantasy called "Le Carnaval des Animaux." Aside from one movement of this piece, "The Swan", Saint-Saens didn't allow this work to be published or even performed until a year had elapsed after his death. (He died in 1921.) Most of us know the "Swan" movement rather well, with its smooth, flowing cello melody against a calm background; but I've been having this fantasy... What if he had written this piece with lyrics, as a song to be sung? And, further, what if he had accompanied this song with a musical saw? (This instrument really does exist, often played by percussionists!) Then the piece would be better known as: SAINT-SAENS' SAW SONG "SWAN"!
"Well, you see, it's such a transitional creature. It's a piss-poor reptile and not very much of a bird." - Melvin Konner, from "The Tangled Wing", quoting a zoologist who has studied the archaeopteryx and found it "very much like people"
All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling. -- H. L. Mencken
Hippogriff, n.: An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half griffin. The griffin was itself a compound creature, half lion and half eagle. The hippogriff was actually, therefore, only one quarter eagle, which is two dollars and fifty cents in gold. The study of zoology is full of surprises. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Brackish-water fishes occur also in salt and fresh water, in some localities at least, and belong to various groups of Teleosteans. Sticklebacks, gobies, grey mullets, blennies are among the best-known examples. The facility with which they accommodate themselves to changes in the medium in which they live has enabled them to spread readily over very large areas. The three-spined stickleback, for instance, occurs over nearly the whole of the cold and temperate parts of the northern hemisphere, whilst a grey mullet (_Mugil capito_) ranges without any appreciable difference in form from Scandinavia and the United States along all the Atlantic coasts to the Cape of Good Hope and Brazil. It would be hardly possible to base zoo-geographical divisions on the distribution of such forms. Entry: A
_Distribution._--For an account of the "realms" and "regions" into which the surface of the globe has been divided by those who have made a special study of the geographical distribution of animals, see ZOOLOGICAL DISTRIBUTION. For the purposes of such zoo-geographical divisions, mammals are much better adapted than birds, owing to their much more limited powers of dispersal; most of them (exclusive of the purely aquatic forms, such as seals, whales, dolphins and sea-cows) being unable to cross anything more than a very narrow arm of the sea. Consequently, the presence of nearly allied groups of mammals in areas now separated by considerable stretches of sea proves that at no very distant date such tracts must have had a land-connexion. In the case of the southern continents the difficulty is, however, to determine whether allied groups of mammals (and other animals) have reached their present isolated habitats by dispersal from the north along widely sundered longitudinal lines, or whether such a distribution implies the former existence of equatorial land-connexions. It may be added that even bats are unable to cross large tracts of sea; and the fact that fruit-bats of the genus _Pteropus_ are found in Madagascar and the Seychelles, as well as in India, while they are absent from Africa, is held to be an important link in the chain of evidence demonstrating a former land-connexion between Madagascar and India. Entry: A
"No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology," says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
11:19. And they bore him sons Jehus, and Somorias, and Zoom.
They say and write and print that the soul and freedom do not exist, for the life of man is expressed by muscular movements and muscular movements are conditioned by the activity of the nerves; the soul and free will do not exist because at an unknown period of time we sprang from the apes. They say this, not at all suspecting that thousands of years ago that same law of necessity which with such ardor they are now trying to prove by physiology and comparative zoology was not merely acknowledged by all the religions and all the thinkers, but has never been denied. They do not see that the role of the natural sciences in this matter is merely to serve as an instrument for the illumination of one side of it. For the fact that, from the point of view of observation, reason and the will are merely secretions of the brain, and that man following the general law may have developed from lower animals at some unknown period of time, only explains from a fresh side the truth admitted thousands of years ago by all the religious and philosophic theories--that from the point of view of reason man is subject to the law of necessity; but it does not advance by a hair's breadth the solution of the question, which has another, opposite, side, based on the consciousness of freedom.
Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:--The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts will show.
And as the undefinable essence of the force moving the heavenly bodies, the undefinable essence of the forces of heat and electricity, or of chemical affinity, or of the vital force, forms the content of astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and so on, just in the same way does the force of free will form the content of history. But just as the subject of every science is the manifestation of this unknown essence of life while that essence itself can only be the subject of metaphysics, even the manifestation of the force of free will in human beings in space, in time, and in dependence on cause forms the subject of history, while free will itself is the subject of metaphysics.
If men descended from the apes at an unknown period of time, that is as comprehensible as that they were made from a handful of earth at a certain period of time (in the first case the unknown quantity is the time, in the second case it is the origin); and the question of how man's consciousness of freedom is to be reconciled with the law of necessity to which he is subject cannot be solved by comparative physiology and zoology, for in a frog, a rabbit, or an ape, we can observe only the muscular nervous activity, but in man we observe consciousness as well as the muscular and nervous activity.
The best biography of Humboldt is that of Professor Karl Bruhns (3 vols., 8vo, Leipzig, 1872), translated into English by the Misses Lassell in 1873. Brief accounts of his career are given by A. Dove in _Allgemeine deutsche Biographie_, and by S. Günther in _Alexander von Humboldt_ (Berlin, 1900). The _Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, fait en 1799-1804, par Alexandre de Humboldt et Aimé Bonpland_ (Paris, 1807, &c.), consisted of thirty folio and quarto volumes, and comprised a considerable number of subordinate but important works. Among these may be enumerated _Vue des Cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l'Amérique_ (2 vols. folio, 1810); _Examen critique de l'histoire de la géographie du Nouveau Continent_ (1814-1834); _Atlas géographique et physique du royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne_ (1811); _Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne_ (1811); _Essai sur la géographie des plantes_ (1805, now very rare); and _Relation historique_ (1814-1825), an unfinished narrative of his travels, including the _Essai politique sur l'île de Cuba_. The _Nova genera et species plantarum_ (7 vols. folio, 1815-1825), containing descriptions of above 4500 species of plants collected by Humboldt and Bonpland, was mainly compiled by C. S. Kunth; J. Oltmanns assisted in preparing the _Recueil d'observations astronomiques_ (1808); Cuvier, Latreille, Valenciennes and Gay-Lussac cooperated in the _Recueil d'observations de zoologie et d'anatomie comparée_ (1805-1833), Humboldt's _Ansichten der Natur_ (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1808) went through three editions in his lifetime, and was translated into nearly every European language. The results of his Asiatic journey were published in _Fragments de géologie et de climatologie asiatiques_ (2 vols. 8vo, 1831), and in _Asie centrale_ (3 vols. 8vo, 1843)--an enlargement of the earlier work. The memoirs and papers read by him before scientific societies, or contributed by him to scientific periodicals, are too numerous for specification. Entry: HUMBOLDT
_Spore-Distribution._--Ordinary conidia and similarly abstricted dry spores are so minute, light and numerous that their dispersal is ensured by any current of air or water, and we also know that rats and other burrowing animals often carry them on their fur; similarly with birds, insects, slugs, worms, &c., on claws, feathers, proboscides, &c., or merely adherent to the slimy body. In addition to these accidental modes of dispersal, however, there is a series of interesting adaptations on the part of the fungus itself. Passing over the locomotor activity of zoospores (_Pythium_, _Peronospora_, _Saprolegnia_) we often find spores held under tension in sporangia (_Pilobolus_) or in asci (_Peziza_) until ripe, and then forcibly shot out by the sudden rupture of the sporangial wall under the pressure of liquid behind--mechanism comparable to that of a pop-gun, if we suppose air replaced by watery sap. Even a single conidium, held tense to the last moment by the elastic cell-wall, may be thus shot forward by a spurt of liquid under pressure in the hypha abstricting it (e.g. _Empusa_), and similarly with _basidiospores_ (_Coprinus_, _Agaricus_, &c.). A more complicated case is illustrated by _Sphaerobolus_, where the entire mass of spores, enclosed in its own peridium, is suddenly shot up into the air like a bomb from a mortar by the elastic retroversion of a peculiar layer which, up to the last moment, surrounded the bomb, and then suddenly splits above, turns inside out, and drives the former as a projectile from a gun. Gelatinous or mucilaginous degenerations of cell-walls are frequently employed in the interests of spore dispersal. The mucilage surrounding endospores of _Mucor_, conidia of _Empusa_, &c., serves to gum the spore to animals. Such gums are formed abundantly in pycnidia, and, absorbing water, swell and carry out the spores in long tendrils, which emerge for days and dry as they reach the air, the glued spores gradually being set free by rain, wind, &c. In oidial chains (_Sclerotinia_) a minute double wedge of wall-substance arises in the middle lamella between each pair of contiguous oidia, and by its enlargement splits the separating lamella. These disjunctors serve as points of application for the elastic push of the swelling spore-ends, and as the connecting outer lamella of cell-wall suddenly gives way, the spores are jerked asunder. In many cases the slimy masses of spermatia (_Uredineae_), conidia (_Claviceps_), basidiospores (_Phallus_, _Coprinus_), &c., emit more or less powerful odours, which attract flies or other insects, and it has been shown that bees carry the fragrant oidia of _Sclerotinia_ to the stigma of _Vaccinium_ and infect it, and that flies carry away the foetid spores of _Phallus_, just as pollen is dispersed by such insects. Whether the strong odour of trimethylamine evolved by the spores of _Tilletia_ attracts insects is not known. Entry: A
Of the civil buildings of the city, the prefecture, one of the finest in France, the Palais de Justice, in front of which is the statue of the advocate Antoine Berryer (1790-1868) and the Exchange, all date from the latter half of the 19th century. The Exchange, built at the expense of the Chamber of Commerce, includes the spacious hall of that institution with its fine mural paintings and gilding. The hôtel-de-ville (17th century) stands on the northern quay of the old harbour. All these buildings are surpassed by the Palais Longchamp (1862-1870), situated in the north-east of the town at the end of the Boulevard Longchamp. The centre of the building is occupied by a monumental _château d'eau_ (reservoir). Colonnades branch off from this, uniting it on the left to the picture gallery, with a fine collection of ancient and modern works, and on the right to the natural history museum, remarkable for its conchological department and collection of ammonites. In front are ornamental grounds; behind are extensive zoological gardens, with the astronomical observatory. The museum of antiquities is established in the Château Borély (1766-1778) in a fine park at the end of the Prado. It includes a Phoenician collection (containing the remains that support the hypothesis of the Phoenician origin of Marseilles), an Egyptian collection, numerous Greek, Latin, and Christian inscriptions in stone, &c. A special building within the city contains the school of art with a valuable library and a collection of medals and coins annexed to it. The city also has a colonial museum and a laboratory of marine zoology. The triumphal arch of Aix, originally dedicated to the victors of the Trocadéro, was in 1830 appropriated to the conquests of the empire. Entry: MARSEILLES
Beetles (Scarabaei) are the subjects of some of the oldest sculptured works of the Egyptians, and references to locusts, bees and ants are familiar to all readers of the Hebrew scriptures. The interest of insects to the eastern races was, however, economic, religious or moral. The science of insects began with Aristotle, who included in a class "Entoma" the true insects, the arachnids and the myriapods, the Crustacea forming another class ("Malacostraca") of the "Anaema" or "bloodless animals." For nearly 2000 years the few writers who dealt with zoological subjects followed Aristotle's leading. Entry: ENTOMOLOGY
BERT, PAUL (1833-1886), French physiologist and politician, was born at Auxerre (Yonne) on the 17th of October 1833. He entered the École Polytechnique at Paris with the intention of becoming an engineer; then changing his mind, he studied law; and finally, under the influence of the zoologist, L.P. Gratiolet (1815-1865), he took up physiology, becoming one of Claude Bernard's most brilliant pupils. After graduating at Paris as doctor of medicine in 1863, and doctor of science in 1866, he was appointed professor of physiology successively at Bordeaux (1866) and the Sorbonne (1869). After the revolution of 1870 he began to take part in politics as a supporter of Gambetta. In 1874 he was elected to the Assembly, where he sat on the extreme left, and in 1876 to the chamber of deputies. He was one of the most determined enemies of clericalism, and an ardent advocate of "liberating national education from religious sects, while rendering it accessible to every citizen." In 1881 he was minister of education and worship in Gambetta's short-lived cabinet, and in the same year he created a great sensation by a lecture on modern Catholicism, delivered in a Paris theatre, in which he poured ridicule on the fables and follies of the chief religious tracts and handbooks that circulated especially in the south of France. Early in 1886 he was appointed resident-general in Annam and Tonkin, and died of dysentery at Hanoi on the 11th of November of that year. But he was more distinguished as a man of science than as a politician or administrator. His classical work, _La Pression barométrique_ (1878), embodies researches that gained him the biennial prize of 20,000 francs from the Academy of Sciences in 1875, and is a comprehensive investigation on the physiological effects of air-pressure, both above and below the normal. His earliest researches, which provided him with material for his two doctoral theses, were devoted to animal grafting and the vitality of animal tissues, and they were followed by studies on the physiological action of various poisons, on anaesthetics, on respiration and asphyxia, on the causes of the change of colour in the chameleon, &c. He was also interested in vegetable physiology, and in particular investigated the movements of the sensitive plant, and the influence of light of different colours on the life of vegetation. After about 1880 he produced several elementary text-books of scientific instruction, and also various publications on educational and allied subjects. Entry: BERT
IDOLATRY, the worship (Gr. [Greek: latreia]) of idols (Gr. [Greek: eidôlon]), i.e. images or other objects, believed to represent or be the abode of a superhuman personality. The term is often used generically to include such varied, forms as litholatry, dendrolatry, pyrolatry, zoolatry and even necrolatry. In an age when the study of religion was practically confined to Judaism and Christianity, idolatry was regarded as a degeneration from an uncorrupt primeval faith, but the comparative and historical investigation of religion has shown it to be rather a stage of an upward movement, and that by no means the earliest. It is not found, for instance, among Bushmen, Fuegians, Eskimos, while it reached a high development among the great civilizations of the ancient world in both hemispheres.[1] Its earliest stages are to be sought in naturism and animism. To give concreteness to the vague ideas thus worshipped the idol, at first rough and crude, comes to the help of the savage, and in course of time through inability to distinguish subjective and objective, comes to be identified with the idea it originally symbolized. The degraded form of animism known as fetichism is usually the direct antecedent of idolatry. A fetich is adored, not for itself, but for the spirit who dwells in it and works through it. Fetiches of stone or wood were at a very early age shaped and polished or coloured and ornamented. A new step was taken when the top of the log or stone was shaped like a human head; the rest of the body soon followed. The process can be followed with some distinctness in Greece. Sometimes, as in Babylonia and India, the representation combined human and animal forms, but the human figure is the predominant model; man makes God after his own image. Entry: IDOLATRY