61 



tion will soon be universally felt, and the possibilities now seem 

 enormous. I mention this subject of heredity especially 

 because it is such a capital illustration of the way in which 

 years of independent and apparently unrelated work in taxon- 

 omy, morphology, cytology and embryology may come to 

 converge sharply upon a definite problem of universal human 

 interest. 



Finally, what has biology done in giving us fundamental con- 

 cepts which may dominate in our mental habits? We often say 

 that great questions are likely to be decided by relatively trivial 

 things, b}' the feelings of the moment, determined perhaps by 

 the last previous meal or by the nature of our night's rest. In 

 saying this we are doubtless taking the interesting exception 

 as the rule. The educated man views his problems and de- 

 termines his course largely by a few fundamental principles that 

 have become part of his mental make-up. The special field 

 of one's work may therefore readily affect one's general attitude 

 by making its peculiar basic principles pronounced in him, quite 

 as well as by the method with which it equips him. These 

 broad principles naturally overlap in other fields, and the dan- 

 ger of not appreciating the differences in their applications to 

 different materials is very great. It is the fortune of biology 

 to have as its dominating concept the idea of genetic continuity 

 in the forms which which it deals, a concept which after it has 

 been vitalized by biological investigation has become quite as 

 dominant in many other fields. The man who has once seen the 

 organic world as the biologist sees it, who has some conception 

 of the intricacies of phylogenetic relations and the factors con- 

 cerned in development, is not likely ever to lose the dynamic 

 point of view. He may not know as much as he would like 

 to know of the political, social, or religious movements of the 

 world, or of the philosophical systems which have held their 

 sway, but his approach to all of these will be immeasurably im- 

 proved if he regards this world in its forms and its activities 

 as a "stage" in more than one sense of that term. In spite of 

 the misconceptions arising from superficial contact with the facts, 

 we shall not likely overestimate the beneficent results of the 



