100 YEARS AGO

Messrs. Sanders and Crowhurst have sent us for examination a number of brilliant lantern slides of birds and other zoological subjects. Photography has been a helpful handmaid to many branches of science, but none of its performances are more widely appreciated than those in the field of natural history. Drawings of animals may have artistic merit, but they do not inspire the feeling of life which is conveyed by good photographs of objects in their natural surroundings. The lantern slides sent by Messrs. Sanders and Crowhurst are from photographs of birds, nests, eggs and young and other living animals taken by Mr. Oliver G. Pike. To lecturers on natural history such true pictures of living creatures must be invaluable, and no better source of encouragement to study nature could be desired. By the side of such beautiful photographic pictures as are now available for projection upon a screen or for the illustration of books, the drawings which did duty in natural history instruction seem but a vain show. Messrs. Sanders and Crowhurst send us with their slides an ingenious arrangement for viewing lantern slides under a low magnifying power. The arrangement, though simple, is very effective, and a pleasant half hour can be passed by using it to look at lantern slides.

From Nature 13 February 1902.

50 YEARS AGO

There are so many examples of the adaptation of an animal to its environment which at first sight would appear to find their simplest explanation in the supposition that the effects of the environment have become inherited, that theories of this kind have continued to retain a following in spite of the lack of clear experimental evidence in their support. This following has been composed mainly of naturalists; experimentalists and geneticists have recently tended to adopt an attitude similar to that of Dobzhansky, who writes: “This question has been discussed almost ad nauseam in the old biological literature... so that we may refrain from the discussion of it altogether”. In dismissing the matter so cavalierly, Dobzhansky was explicitly referring to “direct adaptation”, that is, the hypothesis that when the environment produces an alteration in the development of an animal, it simultaneously causes a change in its hereditary qualities such that the developmental alteration tends to be inherited.

From Nature 16 February 1952.