MAGNALIA NATURE: OR THE GREATER PROBLEMS OF 



BIOLOGY. 1 



BvD'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, C. B., 

 Professor of Natural History in University College, Dundee ( University of St. Andrews). 



The science of zoology, -all the more the incorporate science of 

 biology, is no simple affair, and from its earliest beginnings it has 

 been a great and complex and many-sided thing. We can scarce 

 get a broader view of it than from Aristotle, for no man has ever 

 looked upon our science with a more farseeing and comprehending 

 eye. Aristotle was all things that we mean by "naturalist" or 

 "biologist." He was a student of the ways and doings of beast and 

 bird and creeping thing; he was morphologist and embryologist ; he 

 had the keenest insight into physiological problems, though his age 

 lacked that knowledge of the physical sciences without which phys- 

 iology can go but a little way; he was the first and is the greatest 

 of psychologists; and in the light of his genius biology merged in a 

 great philosophy. 



I do not for a moment suppose that the vast multitude of facts 

 which Aristotle records were all, or even mostly, the fruit of his own 

 immediate and independent observation. Before him were the 

 Hippocratic and other schools of physicians and anatomists. Before 

 him there were nameless and forgotten Fabres, Roesels, Reaumurs, 

 and Hubers, who observed the habits, the diet, and the habitations 

 of the sand wasp or the mason bee; who traced out the little lives 

 and discerned the vocal organs of grasshopper and cicada; and who, 

 together with generations of bee-keeping peasants, gathered up the 

 lore and wisdom of the bee. There were fishermen skilled in all the 

 cunning of their craft, who discussed the wanderings of tunny and 

 mackerel, swordfish or anchovy; who argued over the ages, the 

 breeding places, and the food of this fish or that ; who knew how the 

 smooth dogfish breeds, two thousand years before Johannes Muller; 

 who saw how the male pipefish carries its young, before Cavolini; 

 and who had found the nest of the nest-building rockfishes before 



i Presidential address delivered to the zoological section of the British Association Aug. 31, 1911. 

 Reprinted by permission from author's printed copy. 



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