MAGNALIA NATURA: OR THE GREATER PROBLEMS OF 
BIOLOGY 
By D’Arcy WENtwortH THompson, C. B., 
Professor of Natural History in University College, Dundee ( University of St. Andrews). 
The science of zoology, -all the more the incorporate science of 
biology, is no simple affair, and from its earliest beginnings it has 
been a great and complex and many-sided thing. We can scarce 
get a broader view of it than from Aristotle, for no man has ever 
looked upon our science with a more farseeing and comprehending 
eye. Aristotle was all things that we mean by “naturalist” or 
“biologist.” He was a student of the ways and doings of beast and 
bird and creeping thing; he was morphologist and embryologist; he 
had the keenest insight into physiological problems, though his age 
lacked that knowledge of the physical sciences without which phys- 
lology can go but a little way; he was the first and is the greatest 
of psychologists; and in the light of his genius biology merged in a 
great philosophy. 
I do not for a moment suppose that the vast multitude of facts 
which Aristotle records were all, or even mostly, the fruit of his own 
immediate and independent observation. Before him were the 
Hippocratic and other schools of physicians and anatomists. Before 
him there were nameless and forgotten Fabres, Resels, Réaumurs, 
and Hubers, who observed the habits, the diet, and the habitations 
of the sand wasp or the mason bee; who traced out the little lives 
and discerned the vocal organs of grasshopper and cicada; and who, 
together with generations of bee-keeping peasants, gathered up the 
lore and wisdom of the bee. There were fishermen skilled in all the 
cunning of their craft, who discussed the wanderings of tunny and 
mackerel, swordfish or anchovy; who argued over the ages, the 
breeding places, and the food of this fish or that; who knew how the 
smooth dogfish breeds, two thousand years before Johannes Miiller; 
who saw how the male pipefish carries its young, before Cavolini; 
and who had found the nest of the nest-building rockfishes before 
1 Presidential address delivered to the zoo.ogical section of the British Association Aug. 31, 1911. 
Reprinted by permission from author’s printed copy. 
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