ZOOLOGY 41 



ZOOLOGY 1 



By Professor HENRY B CRAMPTON 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



IN the present series of addresses upon the nature and scope of some 

 of the divisions of knowledge, zoology connects the natural sciences 

 with those subjects that deal with human progress in physical, social, 

 political and economic respects. Like the human and other sciences, 

 zoology has arisen from that vague uncoordinated and unresolved mass 

 of knowledge, the natural philosophy of not very remote times, which 

 undertook to comprehend all there was of nature and thought. And 

 again like the other sciences it is as such a branch of relatively late 

 growth. In earlier times few men were sufficiently withdrawn from 

 the affairs of the market-place and commerce and conquest, from pol- 

 itics and government and theological propaganda, to observe the phe- 

 nomena of nature closely, to reflect upon their observations, and to- 

 summarize their deductions in the formularies of natural law. Not 

 until human social structure neared the relatively settled condition 

 of modern times did it become possible for men to differentiate as 

 students of nature solely, rendering their service to the common weal 

 as investigators of the less practical and more remote departments of 

 knowledge. Now the sciences have become so great, so complex and 

 varied, that it is impossible for a single mind to comprehend all that 

 is included in one of them. So widely the impelling energy of 

 research has driven the soldiers of investigation that only when, as in 

 the present series of addresses, they return to the council-fires of an 

 intellectual bivouac can they come to realize how far-flung indeed are 

 the battle-lines of the armies of science — how rich and diversified is 

 the territory from which knowledge has driven ignorance and super- 

 stition. And they must realize also how impossible it is for them to 

 conduct their operations at all times in entire independence. The 

 results of physics and chemistry are indispensable weapons for the 

 biologist; geology takes the field with paleontology for the study of 

 fossil forms; while on the other hand the advance posts of zoology 

 provide the students of many a human science with a secure base of 

 operations. 



I need not speak of the inter-relations of the several biological 

 sciences, for these have been sufficiently explained in the earlier dis- 



*A lecture delivered at Columbia University in the series on Science, 

 Philosophy and Art December 11, 1907. Copyright, 1908, by the Columbia 

 University Press. 



