22 OHIO STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
the investigation. And in biological research, to return to our text, 
we must not forget for an instant that the organism is a function- 
ing mechanism. We cannot hope to understand any animal or 
plant or organ until we have an exhaustive knowledge of how 
it works. The anatomical fact is dead and inert unless it is 
vivified not only by the “salt of morphological ideas” as it was so 
happily phrased years ago, but also by the fresh warm blood of 
functional explanations. 
Anatomy has given place, within the memory of even the 
younger generation of biologists, to morphology, in which the 
explanation is indissolubly linked with the fact. Nor can we stop 
here. No anatomical fact is complete until its physiological sig- 
nificance is added thereto. Like the old-time descriptive anatomist, 
the ‘pure’ morphologist (or shall we dubb him “poor morpho- 
logist ?”) has no longer any tenable standing ground. What I 
mean is that anatomical structure cannot be understood as the 
morphology of today demands that it must be understeed without 
a full knowledge of the functions of the parts, and we must know 
evolution of function before we can have true knowledge of the 
evolution of structure. And as a matter of fact the biological 
public is just now coming into a practical realization of the truth 
that we must have a comparative physiology parallel with our 
comparative anatomy. It seems to us now very strange that we 
have had to wait a whole century after the birth of comparative 
anatomy for even the beginnings of a realization im practice of 
this elementary principle. 
That researches in descriptive anatomy and in pure mor- 
phology are still necessary and will continue to be called for to 
the end of the age there can be no doubt: but it is important that 
we remember that no study of strucure is complete until the whole 
significance of that structure (including the evolutionary history 
of both its form and its function) 1s exposed and the whole com- 
plex of fact and meaning not only woven together into a single 
fabric, but fitted into the great pattern of reality as a whole in its 
proper place. 
Now, no one of us can do this perfectly and, as time advances 
and the totality of the known becomes ever more vast and intricate, 
the difficulty grows apace. And yet this we must do in some 
measure in so far as we hope to rank as real builders in the 
permanent temple of truth. If we find ourselves unable to see the 
whole ediflce in its proper perspective (as indeed who can?) we 
can at least build harmoniously with that nitch in which we find 
ourselves. Let no man delude himself with the idea that he is 
building for himself alone, that he builds on no other’s foundation 
