1 1 2 The Seottisli Naturalist. 



as to admit of examination without dissection. Do we study the 

 physiology of living things then ? Save of the more apparent 

 functions of locomotion, and the more obvious developmental 

 changes, do we really know anything of the physiology of plants 

 and of animals ? Are not, as Professor Burdon Sanderson says, 

 the structure and functions of active living protoplasm entirely 

 unknown ? The phenomena of distribution might be equally well 

 studied in the dead as in the living matter. The phenomena of 

 Etiology we cannot treat of otherwise than by inference. 



I by no means wish to argue that the definition of Biology 

 given above is unsuitable or erroneous. On the contrary I am 

 willing to accept it with the proviso, that, in dealing with the 

 phenomena of Biology, we understand these phenomena which 

 we may, from an examination of the dead forms, supplemented 

 by such general results as we are able to obtain from a study of 

 living forms, legitimately infer to be characteristic of the plant or 

 animal in its active living state. 



But if the view I have taken be accepted, why may not the 

 Biologist discuss the remains of organisms buried in the crusts of 

 the earth from the same four points of view ? Where indeed will 

 the Palaeontologist draw the line of demarcation between fossil 

 and recent beings ? 



The past life of our globe passes by gradations more or less in- 

 sensible, according to the completeness of Geological Records, into 

 the life of the present. Life in all its fundamental principles has 

 been one since it first appeared. The conditions under which it 

 originated, we may not as yet have grasped ; but there can be no 

 doubt that the physical basis, which, in obedience to the laws of 

 variation, produced thetrilobites of the Silurian, or the ammonites of 

 the Jurassic, was the same as that which, under similar laws, forms 

 the basis of life in the innumerable varieties presented by the 

 different species of living plants and animals. 



( To be continued. ) 



