Dr. W. Kobelt and the Mediterranean Fauna

Abstract

THE second part of Dr. W. Kobelt's “Studien zur Zoogeographie” has been in my hands since its issue, viz., about a year ago, and I have had ample time to become fully acquainted with its merits and its defects. The subject is one which has a singular interest tome, for I have been working out the fauna of Italy and its dependent seas, especially in relation to Vertebrata, for the last five and twenty years, and have formed a collection in which about 38,000 specimens (25,000 being fish) represent the vertebrate fauna of Italy and the seas which surround it. I soon found that although strong in Mollusca, Dr. Kobelt was weak in the knowledge of other classes of animals, and that along with solid fact” his book also contains a number of grave inaccuracies. Now I am very busy, and find that life is far too short to allow the waste of time caused by polemics; I usually, therefore, avoid them, and should certainly have passed over Dr. Kobelt's errors and omissions had not your reviewer's remarks in No. 1570 of NATURE (page 99) rendered it imperative that I also should ask you to allow me to make a few remarks. NATURE has now fully undertaken the noble task of keeping scientific investigators up to the mark as regards the general progress of knowledge, and it is not fair that it should unwittingly propagate error. Now of the several chapters of Dr. W. Kobelt's book, the poorest and the worst is by far the one (viertes Kapitel) which he has devoted to “Das Mittelmeer,” the classic ground of the renowned labours of Edward Forbes and of so many before and after him. How ever could a German living in the land of book worms and patient labourers in bibliography write such a chapter, and come amongst other incorrect and incongruous conclusions, to that pyramidal error that the abyssal parts of the Mediterranean are azoic? Good and learned Dr. Carpenter said something similar about twenty years ago, after the fruitless dredgings of the Porcupine and Shearwater, but he lived to know that he had been mistaken, and we discussed the very subject together at a dinner at his own house in June 1883.