380 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 
Gerbe rediscovered it almost in our own day. There were curious 
students of the cuttle fish (1 sometimes imagine they may have been 
priests of that sea-born goddess to whom the creatures were sacred), 
who had diagnosed the species, recorded the habits, and dissected 
the anatomy of the group, even to the discovery of that strange hec- 
tocotylus arm that baffled Della Chiaje, Cuvier, and Koelliker, and 
that Vérany and Heinrich Miller reexplained. 
All this varied learning Aristotle gathered up and wove into his 
great web. But every here and there, in words that are unmistakably 
the master’s own, we hear him speak of what are still the great 
problems and even the hidden mysteries of our science; of such 
things as the nature of variation, of the struggle for existence, of 
specific and generic differentiation of form, of the origin of the tis- 
sues, the problems of heredity, the mystery of sex, of the phenomena 
of reproduction and growth, the characteristics of habit, instinct, 
and intelligence, and of the very meaning of life itself. Amid all the 
maze of concrete facts that century after century keeps adding to 
our store, these, and such as these, remain the great mysteries of 
natural science—the magnalia nature, to borrow a great word from 
Bacon, who in his turn had borrowed it from St. Paul. 
Not that these are the only great problems for the biologist, nor 
that there is but a single class of great problems in biology, for 
Bacon himself speaks of the magnalia nature, quoad usus humanos, 
the study of which has for its objects ‘‘the prolongation of life or the 
retardation of age, the curing of diseases counted incurable, the 
mitigation of pain, the making of new species and transplanting of 
one species into another,’”’ and so on through many more. Assuredly, 
T have no need to remind you that a great feature of this generation 
of ours has been the way in which biology has been justified of her 
children in the work of those who have studied the magnalia nature, 
quoad usus humanos. 
But so far are biologists from being nowadays engrossed in practical 
questions, in applied and technical zoology, to the neglect of its more 
recondite problems, that there never was a time when men thought 
more deeply or labored with greater zeal over the fundamental phe- 
nomena of living things; never a time when they reflected in a broader 
spirit over such questions as purposive adaptation, the harmonious 
working of the fabrie of the body in relation to environment, and the 
interplay of all the creatures that people the earth; over the problems 
of heredity and variation; over the mysteries of sex and the phe- 
nomena of generation and reproduction, by which phenomena, as the 
wise woman told, or reminded, Socrates, and as Harvey said again (and 
for that matter, as Coleridge said, and Weismann, but not quite so 
well)—by which, as the wise old woman said, we gain our glimpse of 
insight into eternity and immortality. These, then, together with 
