2l6 WHITMAN. 



The functions of a biological farm are not all summed up in 

 experimentation. That old and true method of natural history 

 observation must ever have a large share in the study of living 

 things. Observation, experiment and reflection are three in one. 

 Together they are omnipotent ; disjoined they become impotent 

 fetiches. The biology of to-day, as we are beginning to realize, 

 has not too much laboratory, but too little of living nature. The 

 farm will certainly do much to mend this great deficiency. The 

 farm would enable us to work out life-histories, bring us face to 

 face with instinct, put it under control, so that we could handle 

 it, photograph it, analyze it, read its history, and extort from it an 

 answer to the question, Whence and how came intelligence ? 



It would enable us to extend the study of development beyond 

 the stages represented in the egg and the embryo to those leading 

 up to mature age, and thus bring within reach vast series of most 

 important data for the study of evolution. 



In such data we might expect to see to what extent individual 

 development recapitulates race development, and to get important 

 clues to the meaning of this so-called biogenetic law. The whole 

 meaning of development and heredity is involved in these phe- 

 nomena of " recapitulation." That the first step in recapitulation 

 is the germ-cell, we know. The fertilized germ, or egg, passes 

 through a series of form-stages, leading through the morula, 

 blastula, gastrula, embryo, larva, etc. Whether these stages 

 epitomize the ancestral series is a question very difficult to decide, 

 and opinion is much divided. This obscure but fundamental 

 problem of development can probably never be solved by embryo- 

 logical data alone. Paleontology throws much light on the 

 general question, but deals entirely with non-living remains. If 

 there be recapitulation, it should certainly be discoverable in 

 post-embryonic stages, where characteristic features are slowly 

 elaborated and brought to a completion in detail quite beyond 

 the possibilities in earlier life. Strange to say, these later stages 

 have been but little studied in living forms, museum morgues 

 having been the chief reliance. It is in these stages that recapitu- 

 lation may be actually seen as a life-process, successive steps in 

 evolution repeating themselves with sufficient fullness to satisfy 

 the most skeptical. Such sequences are often manifest in the 



