MODERN BIOLOGICAL INQUIRY. 295 



Yet upon the earth, without the volcano and the earthquake, and 

 the elevating forces of which they are the feeble indications, there 

 would be no permanent sepai-ation of land and water ; consequently 

 no progress in animal and vegetable life beyond what is possible in 

 the ocean. To us, then, as sentient beings, the volcano and the earth- 

 quake, viewed from a biological stand-i)oint, have a profound signiK- 

 cance. 



It is indeed difficult to see in what manner the student of purely 

 physical science is brought to a knoAvledge of any evidences of intel- 

 ligence in the arrangement of the universe. The poet, inspired by 

 meditating on the immeasurable abyss of space and the transcendent 

 glories of the celestial orbs, has declared 



" The undevout astronomer is mad," 



and his saying had a certain amount of speciousness, on account of 

 the magnitude of the bodies and distances with which the student of 

 the stars is concerned. This favorite line is, however, only an exam- 

 ple of what an excellent writer has termed " the unconscious action 

 of volition upon credence," and it is properly in the correlations 

 of the inorganic with the organic world that we may hope to ex- 

 hibit, with clearness, the adaptations of plan prefigured and design 

 executed. 



In the methods and results of investigation, the mathematician 

 differs from both the physicist and the biologist. Unconfined, like 

 the former, by the few simple relations by which movements in the 

 inorganic world are controlled, he may not only vary the fox-m of his 

 analysis, almost at pleasure, making it more or less transcendental in 

 many directions, but he may introduce factors or relations, apparently 

 inconceivable in real existences, and then intei'pret them into results 

 quite as real as those of the legitimate calculus with which he is work- 

 ing, but lying outside of its domain. 



If biology can ever be developed in such manner that its results 

 may be expressed in mathematical formulse, it will be the pleasing 

 task of the future analyst to ascertain the nature of the inconceivable 

 (or imaginary as they are termed in mathematics) quantities which 

 must be introduced when changes of form or structure take place. 

 Such will be analytical morphology, in its proper sense ; but it is a 

 science of the future, and will require for its calculus a very complex 

 algebra. 



In the observation of the habits of inferior animals, we recognize 

 many complications of action, which, though directed to the accom- 

 plishment of definite purposes, we do not entirely comprehend. They 

 are, in many instances, not the result of either the experience of the 

 individual, or the education of its parents, who in low forms of ani- 

 mals frequently die before the hatching of the offspring. These actions 

 have been grouped together, whether simple or complex, as directed 



