WOODS AND TREES? 
PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF SOME FACTS OF SCIENCE 
By FREDERICK H. KRECKER 
Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 
Some of you, I am sure, are wondering why a zoologist should 
presume to discuss a subject which apparently lies within the domain 
of the botanist. Of course to be strictly zoological I might have 
used the words formicaries and ants, but no one before me has said, 
“One can’t see the formicary for the ants,” and I do not presume to 
establish a saying. 
I have had considerable experience instructing the general arts 
college student, the student who takes zoology as a college require- 
ment and without thought of continuing in the field beyond the limits 
of the course. Each year at about this season, after all the tumult 
and the shouting of instruction have died down, in the wee small 
hours of the fading academic year, I take stock and ask myself in 
troubled seriousness, “What have I conveyed to my charges?” Facts, 
most certainly; but facts without their significance are as food with- 
cut vitamins. One is filled but does not thrive. Hence, I query, 
have I been content to show to my students merely the trees of fact, 
each after each in all their intricacy of detail, or have I also taken 
them to a vantage point and shown them the beauty and majesty of 
the forest? Have I, in other words, taken full advantage of the 
opportunities which President Brown of Denison at our last meet- 
ing so eloquently ascribed to the instructors of science. You will 
remember that in the course of his remarks he humorously itemized 
the tongue-twisting terms that met his gaze as he reviewed the requisi- 
tions of his scientific staff. President Brown, however, saw beyond 
the terms and the facts they represent. He saw them as a means, 
not as ends. Unfortunately, some members of our scientific fra- 
ternity, not to mention the man in the street, see only the terms. 
Nothing is so revealing, so pathetically revealing, as the desperate 
efforts the casual acquaintance makes to find a common ground of 
1 Address of the retiring president of the Ohio Academy of Science delivered at the 
annual meeting of the Academy held in Columbus, Ohio, April 30, 1943. Reprinted by 
permission from the Ohio Journal of Science, vol. 43, No. 4, July 1943. 
307 
