A STEP FORWARD IN THE METHODOLOGY OF NATURAL 

 SCIENCE (AN INTRODUCTION TO: THE FUNCTIONAL 

 RELATION OF ONE VARIABLE TO EACH OF A 

 NUMBER OF CORRELATED VARIABLES DE- 

 TERMINED BY A METHOD OF SUCCESSIVE 

 APPROXIMATION TO GROUP AVER- 

 AGES. BY GEORGE F. McEWEN 

 AND ELLIS L. MICHAEL). 



By Wm. E. Ritteb. 



Received April 17, 1919. Presented May 14, 1919. 



Modern biology, as the phrase is generally understood, is a devel- 

 opment of laboratory and experimental methods. This development 

 has been unprecedentedly rapid and rich. No one can deny this. 

 But neither can any one fail to see, if he faces the situation squarely, 

 that such development has rather narrow and wholly insurmountable 

 limitations. 



Only a relatively small part of all the phenomena of living nature 

 can be brought into the confines of the laboratory or by any means 

 whatever subjected to control. The sciences of organic nature, 

 botany and zoology, are in like case with those of inorganic nature, 

 astronomy, geology, physical geography, meteorology, etc., as re- 

 gards controllability. This is only an illustrative way of expressing 

 the general truth that every science is able to study the phenomena 

 of its province to only a relatively limited extent in the laboratory, 

 or by experiment in the manipulative sense. As to the overwhelm- 

 ingly vaster part of nature, those who would investigate it in very 

 fact must go where it is, as far as this is possible, and where this is 

 impossible must reach it by such indirect means as may be devised. 

 This is so patent a truth as hardly to need nxention : if the astronomer 

 would investigate the stars of the southern sky he must go to the south- 

 ern hemisphere; that is, must go where he can see those stars, and 

 must study them as he finds them, not as he might wish to by manipu- 

 lating them in a laboratory or on an experimental plot of the heavens. 

 Similar conditions and limitations are imposed upon the biologist, _ 

 If he is to study the starfishes of the southern hemisphere, he must 

 go to oceans in that part of the earth and resort to such means as he 



