2 ANIMAL BIOLOGY 



Our present interest, however, is not in discussing the theoretical 

 goal of biology, but in drawing in bold strokes an outline picture 

 of the present-day knowledge of the subject which represents the 

 cumulative results of the application of the scientific method 

 to problems of life. This method is not peculiar to science, but is 

 merely a perfected concentration of our human resources of obser- 

 vation, experimentation, and reflection. Thus far this has been 

 a most productive method and certainly has given no evidence 

 that its usefulness is being exhausted. But, of course, "in ultimate 

 analysis everything is incomprehensible, and the whole object of 

 science is simply to reduce the fundamental incomprehensibilities 

 to the smallest possible number." 



A. Origin of Life Lore 



The foundations of the scientific study of living nature were 

 laid by Aristotle and Theophrastus over 2000 years ago. On the 

 basis of collecting, dissecting, classifying, and pondering they 

 reached generalizations, many of which have but recently been 

 put on a firm basis of fact. Indeed, they seem to have raised 

 nearly all the broad questions which are fundamental to-day; 

 but from the Greeks until about the fifteenth century there is 

 little to record. There were many additions to the body of 

 knowledge during this long slumber period, but fact and fancy 

 were so intermingled that the truth was largely obscured. 

 (Figs. 288, 289.) 



The feeling that, though Man is of nature, he is still apart, was 

 expressed at the revival of learning, during the sixteenth century 

 and later, in the broad classification of all knowledge as history 

 of nature and history of Man; the former recording the "history 

 of such facts or effects of nature as have no dependence on Man's 

 will, such as the histories of metals, plants, animals, regions, and the 

 like"; the latter treating of the voluntary actions of men in 

 communities. Thus all record of facts was either natural history 

 or civil history. From this general field of natural history the 

 present-day sciences of astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, 

 and biology became separated as relatively independent bodies of 

 facts as each gained content, clearness, and individuality. Astron- 

 omy, physics or natural philosophy, and chemistry were set apart 

 first owing to the fact that their material was more readily suscep- 

 tible to mathematical and experimental treatment, thus leaving 



