Biology and Mathematics 
DR. GEORGE BRUCE HALSTED 
That which is most characteristic of the present epoch in the 
history of man is undoubtedly the vast and beneficent growth 
of science. 
In things apart from science, other races at times long past 
may be compared to the most civilized people of today. 
The lyric poetry of Sappho has never been equaled. The 
epic flavor of Homer, even after translation, comes down to us 
unsurpassed through the ages. 
Dante, the voice of ten silent centuries, may wait another 
ten centuries before his maedieval miracle of song finds its peer. 
The Apollo Belvidere, the Venus of Milo, the Laocoon are 
the glory of antique, the despair of modern sculpture. To men- 
tion oratory to a schoolboy is to recall Demosthenes, and Cicero, 
even if he has never pictured Caesar, that greatest of the sons 
of men, quelling the mutinous soldiery by his first word, or with 
outstretched arm, in Egypt's palace window, holding enthralled 
his raging enemies, gaining precious moments, time, the only 
thing he needed to enable him to crush them under his dominant 
intellect. 
There is no need for multiplying examples. The one thing 
that give; the present generation its predominance is science. 
All criticisms of life made before science had taken its pres- 
ent place, or attempting to ignore its prominence are obsolete, 
as are of necessity any systems founded on pre-scientific or 
anti-scientific conceptions. 
Now the latest of the great sciences is biology, and it could 
be so widely interpreted as to include many of the others, for 
example, physiology, psychology, sociology; but chiefly it takes 
for itself the broad general beginnings. 
These older sciences were really engaged upon narrow 
domains, narrow ramifications in the universe of biology; and 
the general has helped the pre-existent special by giving the 
broader conceptions connoted by comparative phy siology, 
comparative psychology, comparative sociology. 
