i897. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 3 



Finding that " Nansen has very httle of his own to name," and that 

 he was apparently disappointed at being " unable to name anything 

 in the neighbourhood where he passed a winter under such con- 

 ditions," Mr. Jackson offered to allow Nansen to name the island. 

 This offer Mr. Jackson's expositor describes as an act of " single- 

 mindedness, generosity, and an entire absence of anything approaching 

 a petty sense of rivalry . . . difficult to beat in the annals of explora- 

 tion." Jackson remarked that the naming of this country "only rests 

 between himself, [Nansen] and me." The fact that it had been pre- 

 viously named the Karl Alexander Land by Payer, as the new map in 

 the Geographical Journal shows, is a trivial detail that Mr. Jackson 

 seems to have overlooked. Nansen, however, appears to have under- 

 stood this ; he is a man of humour, and entered into the spirit of the 

 joke. So he promptly called the country " Frederick Jackson Island," 

 apparently as a mark of his appreciation of the originality of the 

 discoveries of his rescuer, whose gracious permission to re-name an 

 already named island has conferred immortality upon the little trip 

 of the " Fram." 



The Value of Morphology. 



The suggestive paper by Mr. MacBride, appearing in our present 

 number, states many of the problems now engaging the earnest 

 attention of biologists, botanists no less than zoologists. The great 

 question before us really is : What do we mean by Biology ; what is 

 the aim of our research ? Put broadly, the object of those who think 

 on such matters is no doubt to fit all the phenomena of life, both 

 physical and psychical, into some general scheme of the philosophy of 

 the universe, alongside the phenomena of inorganic matter. If once 

 this could be accomplished, all questions of minor philosophic, but 

 major practical, interest would receive their answers by simple 

 deduction. Till then, of course, our energies will constantly be 

 distracted towards the solution of problems bearing on the daily life of 

 our own species. But setting bread-and-butter considerations aside 

 for the moment, and placing before us only the grand enigma, we have 

 each of us to test our own line of investigation by its concordance with 

 this main direction of philosophic enquiry. 



Mr. MacBride discusses a few of the methods of zoology, but 

 chiefly the morphological method. How far, he says in effect, does 

 the comparison of the structure of the various species and genera of 

 animals shed light on the relation of life to not-life, on the steps and 

 the causes of evolution, on the problems of heredity, and on other 

 obscurities that need illumination ? This line of attack has been » 

 much criticised of late : there are earnest workers, to whom 

 shallowness of thought cannot be imputed, who reject the methods of 

 dissection, description, minute comparison, and systematic analysis of 

 species. They say that these methods will not stand the touch-stone ; 

 that they are barren of philosophic fruit. Mr. MacBride does not 



