SPECULATIVE ZOOLOGY. 37g 



so long as they are the best, we can not regard them as abstractions. 

 We must welcome them as something more than knowledge as an in- 

 crease of wisdom in its widest sense. 



If this justification of morphological speculation seems vague and 

 indefinite, we need not seek far for more concrete reasons for encour- 

 aging this kind of thought, one of the most important features of 

 which is its value as an intellectual discipline. 



We can hardly overestimate the value of the power to reach log- 

 ical conclusions, for this power is the basis of all wise conduct, and that 

 education which aids in its acquisition has pre-eminent claims upon 

 our attention. In almost every case where we are called upon to form 

 a judgment, and to act upon it, the premises are so uncertain, the con- 

 ditions of the problem so numerous and so little known, and its rela- 

 tions to other things admit of so much variation, that our conclusion 

 can be nothing but a probability ; and it is of the greatest importance 

 that the mind should be trained in such a way as to fit it for forming 

 wise judgments upon this class of complicated and indefinite prob- 

 lems. 



Now, the questions which are presented for solution in the more 

 exact physical sciences differ from the questions of morphology in 

 the same way that they differ from the problems upon which we are 

 constantly called to decide and act in ordinary life, but the degree of 

 difference is less. 



While the number of factors involved in a morphological problem 

 is vastly greater than that of those which bear upon any problem into 

 which life does not enter, and while the relations between these factors 

 vary, in closely allied cases, in a way which has no parallel outside life- 

 science, the problems of general morphology are still vastly simpler 

 than those of society or of morality, or of almost any other department 

 of human conduct, although they are like them in kind, and supply the 

 same sort of evidence. The attempt to trace the mode of action of a 

 constantly changing environment upon a form of life inheriting from 

 an unknown series of ancestors a constitution that has been modified 

 by a series of changes that can not be repeated, is no bad training for 

 the attempt to foresee the working of a social reform that admits of 

 no experiment, but must be tried once for all ; which involves so many 

 side-issues that no exact parallel to it can be found, and which is so 

 complicated that it is impossible to foresee or follow out its results in 

 detail. 



The problems of the physical sciences are too definite and simple to 

 afford much intellectual training in this most important field, and the 

 problems of human life and society are too involved, too diversified, 

 and too changeable to afford a proper field for studying the logical 

 basis of our opinions ; but in morphology we find what is needed, a 

 field midway between the two. 



The discipline which is to be obtained by the careful mastery of 



