I 



OBITUARY NOTICES OF MEMBERS DECEASED. VU 



His chief interest was always in the philosophical side of biology 

 and into this he put the larger part of his life work. Even the 

 special researches, some of which have been named above, were 

 permeated by philosophical inquiry, and most of his books and later 

 contributions were devoted to the deeper philosophical meanings 

 of vital phenomena. 



As a boy he had read the works of Darwin and had been im- 

 mensely impressed by them and to the last he yielded to no one in 

 his admiration and reverence for that great master. Probably no 

 other disciple of Darwin was more thoroughly acquainted with his 

 works, and very frequently when criticisms of Darwinism appeared 

 he would point out the fact that the critic did not understand what 

 Darwinism is, or that Darwin had already met and answered the 

 objections raised. 



In 1884 he published a book entitled " The Law of Heredity," 

 which in some respects anticipated the theories of Weismann, and 

 which won the highest commendation from Huxley and other 

 leaders of biology. But probably the book by which he will be 

 longest remembered is the series of lectures delivered at Columbia 

 University and published in the Biological Series of that institution 

 under the title "The Foundations of Zoology" (1899). In this 

 book he deals with many subjects fundamental not only to zoology, 

 but to science and philosophy in general. Among these may be 

 mentioned " Nature and Nurture," " Zoology and the Philosophy 

 of Evolution," " Natural Selection and the Antiquity of Life," 

 " Natural Selection and Natural Theology," " Paley and the Argu- 

 ment from Contrivance," " The Mechanism of Nature," " Louis 

 Agassiz and George Berkeley," etc. On the whole his chief points of 

 view may be summarized in his oft-quoted remark of Aristotle that 

 the " essence of a living thing is not what it is made of nor what it 

 does, but why it does it," or as he expresses it elsewhere, "the essence 

 of a living thing is not protoplasm but purpose " ; and in the further 

 statements which he draws from Berkeley, that " nature is a lan- 

 guage," that " phenomena are appearances," and that " natural laws 

 are not arbitrary nor necessary, but natural, i. e., neither less nor 

 more than one who has the data has every reason to expect." 



On March 25, 1898, sixty of his former students united in pre- 



