Apologia 



"WHETHER," as William Morton Wheeler says in his 

 "Entomologist in Hades," "whether we contemplate the 

 whole or only some particular portion of the realm of liv- 

 ing things, it eventually tends to become for us merely so 

 much material to be used in the solution of the many 

 tantalizing problems which it suggests. We are, indeed, 

 obsessed by problems. No doubt this is the correct attitude 

 for the seasoned investigator, and no doubt a certain spirit 

 of skeptical inquiry should be cultivated even in freshmen, 

 but surely we should realize, like the amateur, that the 

 organic world is also an inexhaustible source of spiritual 

 and esthetic delight. And especially in the college we are 

 unfaithful to our trust, if we allow biology to become a 

 colorless, aridly scientific discipline, devoid of living con- 

 tact with the humanities. Our intellects will never be equal 

 to exhausting biological reality. Why animals and plants 

 are as they are, we shall never know; of how they have 

 come to be what they are, our knowledge will always be 

 extremely fragmentary, because we are dealing only with 

 recent phases of an immense and complicated history, most 

 of the records of which are lost beyond all chance of re- 

 covery; but that organisms are as they are, that apart from 

 the members of our own species, they are our only com- 

 panions in an infinite and unsympathetic waste of elec- 



