Implications of the Theories of Nerve Action 209 



to be in reality dependent on such agencies, this school is 

 wont to remark in substance that investigation has finally 

 "transferred" the phenomena from the provinces of zoologv, 

 morphology, general physiology and the other sciences of 

 animal life, to physics and chemistry. Our argument puts 

 beyond question the logical inadequacy of such a statement. 

 Analysis does not by any means transfer the phenomena 

 from zoology, etc., into physics and chemistry. Neither 

 analysis nor any other agency can any more take the study 

 of animal phenomena away from zoology and put it into 

 physics and chemistry than it can take bread-making away 

 from the baker's art and put it into physics and chemistry. 

 The chemist may undoubtedly take to bread-making and find 

 that his new employment has much in common with his old; 

 but in so far as he really succeeds at the new, he is more a 

 baker than a chemist. He has not transferred bread-making 

 to chemistry, but if anything has done just the reverse. 

 What analysis actually docs in these cases is to extend the 

 bounds of physico-chemical forces and laws into zoology* 

 morphology, etc., and to prove that if zoological, morpholog- 

 ical and physiological undertakings are to move into ever 

 greater fullness, aid from physics and chemistry is indis- 

 pensable. 



Thus critical examination of the reasoning of elemen- 

 talist biology reveals the logical fallacy in any sort of state- 

 ment which involves the assumption that the older sciences 

 of organic beings, like taxonomic botany and zoology, geo- 

 graphical distribution, morphology, general physiology and 

 so on, are not and never can be relegated to places of minor 

 or secondary importance in biology. But it is the practical 

 harmfulness of such assumptions rather than the logical 

 fallacies underlying them which chiefly concern us in this 

 volume, and no part of our whole subject is more vitally 

 affected by such harmfulness than this of the behavior, even 

 the purely tropistic behavior, of animals. The whole round 



