THE SCIENCE OF BIOLOGY 437 



of all life, the last eflfort of creation, and its lord and controller; it is 

 now recognized that Man falls into a regular and orderly place in 

 the pattern of life and of evolutionary development. Unquestionably 

 the recognition of the true place of Man has been one of the power- 

 ful influences in the growth of liberalism. 



Whatever use is now or in the future made of the principles of 

 Biology, whether they contribute to human welfare by reason of 

 their value to applied science or to human thought because of their 

 abstract value, the problems of Biology constitute a powerful chal- 

 lenge to the human mind. Not a day of a human life is spent with- . 

 out the individual's encountering, consciously or unconsciously, 

 some as yet unsolved problem of vital phenomena, or some personal 

 problem of human health, human behavior, human food, or human 

 energy. The inquisitive nature of Man prompts him to undertake 

 the solution of these problems and since time immemorial the more 

 inquisitive minds have tended to accumulate into communities. The 

 modern university is such a community. The function of such a 

 group in human society always has been the acquisition and dis- 

 semination of knowledge, a function that never has been successfully 

 divided, for every fact and every interpretation that a student en- 

 counters in any university curriculum are the products of someone's 

 devotion to the search for truth. So university departments of 

 Biology, however they may be administered or organized, have 

 always and inescapably the two-fold function of investigating bio- 

 logical problems and of disseminating that knowledge already at 

 hand. Devoted to this task is an army of scientists; all are human 

 and therefore subject to the mistakes, prejudices, and flaws that 

 characterize human effort in general. But their devotion to Science 

 is an expression of an innate, personal adherence to a desire for 

 knowing the truth. This interest cannot be successfully forced nor 

 controlled by political pressure nor economic influence; scientists 

 cannot be told to solve a certain problem within a certain time and 



