Sir David Prain 71 



sophy" undertook to co-ordinate as well as to advance physical and 

 chemical truth. A subdivision of natural study according to subject 

 thus replaced one according to method. 



This change was convenient. Its only disadvantage was the retention 

 of a terminology no longer appropriate. History is of equal consequence 

 to physics and to biology; co-ordination of knowledge is as essential to 

 inorganic as to organic study. Biology makes use of philosophy just as 

 physics and chemistry do. If philosophy enabled physics to establish 

 the principle of "conservation of energy," she helped what we still term 

 "natural history" to formulate the doctrine of "evolution." 



The new arrangement was already recognised before the end of the 

 first quarter of the eighteenth century and "natural history," as then 

 understood, has observed her obhgation ever since. The effect of the 

 change on economic biology is what interests us now. Our study obtained 

 from "natural history" that philosophical acquaintance with the char- 

 acters and virtues of animals and plants as organisms which underhes 

 "domestication." For information regarding the structure and functions 

 of the animal and the plant as mechanisms, economic biology was 

 indebted to the Institutes of Medicine, already a powerful technical 

 study, and the Institutes of Rural Economy, one still relatively back- 

 ward. 



By the middle of the eighteenth century the mechanical arts decided 

 to follow the example of medicine. Aware of the progress due to technical 

 studies evolved by the art of heahng, "natural philosophy" approved 

 the adoption by the engineer of technical in place of philosophical 

 methods in securing the knowledge he required. This enabled "natural 

 philosophy" to hmit her activities to the promotion of inorganic natural 

 knowledge. Relief from the task of applying knowledge induced an 

 increase in the activity involved in codification. This new impulse 

 spread from inorganic to organic philosophical study and natural know- 

 ledge underwent an "encyclopaedic" phase. The more intensive interest 

 in the characters and virtues of animals and plants thus induced w^as 

 not accompanied by, and is thought by some to have inhibited, a com- 

 parable activity in the study of organic structure and function. During 

 this period therefore the relationship of economic biology to natural 

 study Was hardly affected. 



Among the tasks undertaken by physical and chemical technique at 

 the instance of the mechanical arts were those of providing biological 

 study with instruments more effective and methods more precise. The 

 success which attended these efforts was such that within the first 



