Exotic Zoology

Zoology continues, in a reasonably orderly manner, to make vast progress. But this book is not concerned with the main stream of its discoveries and classifications. They are interesting and good textbook material, but such textbooks exist by the carload. Here the author investigates some bypaths - unexpected turns of events, cases which interrupted routine, facts which made learned men sit back and say, "Now I remember that somebody once told me..." For convenience, these investigations have been grouped into five divisions/chapters: Myth? ~ Records in Stone ~ Oceanic Mysteries ~ Some Fabulous Islands ~ Witnesses of the Past. As might be expected of living - or formerly living - things, some don't fit too neatly into these divisions, and some could equally well have been put into one as another. But this is not very important, because, after all, the whole book is about things which did not fit, with some explorations into the reasons. As is suitable in a science which began with the beginning of travel, these explorations take in some remote parts of the world, and, inevitably, they cover a great deal of geologic as well as historic time.