An Introduction to a Biology 



Correlation," may remember that I concluded it with the 

 observation " Directly we can play with machinery we can see 

 how it works. Movement and change enable us to perceive 

 and to understand." I think this represents a very general 

 truth about our relation to natural phenomena. And if you 

 agree that it does you will also agree that our best way of 

 attaining to a true knowledge of life is to study the pheno- 

 menon presented by life undergoing change, that is to say, 

 to study evolution. 



Whatever may have been thought of any scheme for 

 improving mankind, whether physically or morally, put for- 

 ward before the time when a belief in evolution had become 

 general, the one thing certain about such a scheme is that 

 it belonged wholly to the realm of fancy. But now that a 

 belief in evolution has become current intellectual coin, the 

 hope of breeding a race of supermen has become more than 

 a Utopian dream, and the early years of this century wit- 

 nessed the foundation of a department of Eugenics whose 

 ultimate object is the amelioration of the race. The know- 

 ledge that we have not always been in the past as we are 

 now gives us hope that we may not always be in the future 

 as we now are. 



. . . The plasticity of the organic type is the one thing 

 which gives us hope for the future. AVas there not some 

 prophetic significance of this kind in the words spoken by 

 Ophelia in her madness : " They say the owl was a baker's 

 daughter. Lord ! we know what we are, but we know not 

 what we may be " ? 



But Rome was not built in a day, and the change which 

 can be effected in a single generation will be infinitesimally 

 small. And though we cannot hold the extreme form of 

 belief in this plasticity which was entertained by Ophelia, 

 who quotes without comment, but as the context shows 

 with approval, the statement that the owl was a baker's 

 daughter, we may efiect some alleviation in the sufiering 



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