President's Address. 87 



not so much a naturalist or scientist as philosopher; and yet his 

 philosophic grasp of first principles enabled him to correct his 

 friend Huxley, one of the greatest of comparative anatomists, and 

 Hewlings Jackson, a very eminent authority on the pathology of 

 the nervous system, in some questions of fact respecting the com- 

 parative anatomy and pathology of the cerebellum. 



Spencer had had very limited opportunities for studying the com- 

 parative anatomy of animals; but his mind, skilled in philosophy, 

 had seized and retained the essential facts of comparative anatomy 

 as they were presented to him in conversation, in the course of his 

 reading, and in his limited opportunities for observation, and he 

 was thus enabled to correct specialists in their own fields of re- 

 search. 



These remarkable powers of the scientist-philosopher seem at 

 times almost miraculous to those uneducated in scientific methods. 

 He tells the astronomer where to point his instrument to discover 

 a new world. The astronomer obeys and, behold, it is there ! Or 

 he tells the chemist that elements of certain atomic weights are 

 needed to fill gaps in the arrangement of the elements according to 

 the periodic law, and the chemist goes to his laboratory and finds 

 them. 



In a paper read at the Topeka meeting, objection was made by 

 your speaker to the attempts of certain biologists to make biology 

 a mathematical science, as are physics, chemistry, and astronomy. 

 It was declared in the paper that the mathematician is concerned 

 with the investigation of certain exactly statable postulates or hy- 

 potheses ; that in biology, on the contrary, the one who uses the 

 method of the mathematician can meet only with wrong results, for 

 life obeys no law other than its own highest good, and this cannot 

 be stated in mathematically exact terms. If the following para- 

 graphs taken from Science are true, the above statement seems to 

 need modification. 



In Science for August 11, 1905, Dr. George Bruce Halstead, of 

 Kenyon College, Gambler, Ohio, discusses the relationship of biol- 

 ogy to the new mathematics, the mathematics that has given us 

 the non-Euclidian geometry. I quote from this article. Doctor 

 Halstead says: 



"Thus, as the Russian, Alexeieff, has pointed out, after the con- 

 tinuity world scheme had captured the fundamental natural sciences 

 — geometry, mechanics, astronomy, physics, chemistry^ — had en- 

 trenched itself in them and dowered them with generality, uniform- 

 ity, universality, it went over gradually with scientific investigators, 



