380 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 



Gerbe rediscovered it almost in our own day. There were curious 

 students of the cuttle fish (I sometimes imagine they may have been 

 priests of that sea-born goddess to whom the creatures were sacred), 

 who had diagnosed the species, recorded the habits, and dissected 

 the anatomy of the group, even to the discovery of that strange hec- 

 tocotylus arm that baffled Delia Chiaje, Cuvier, and Koelliker, and 

 that Verany and Heinrich Muller reexplained. 



All this varied learning Aristotle gathered up and wove into his 

 great web. But every here and there, in words that are unmistakably 

 the master's own, we hear him speak of what are still the great 

 problems and even the hidden mysteries of our science; of such 

 things as the nature of variation, of the struggle for existence, of 

 specific and generic differentiation of form, of the origin of the tis- 

 sues, the problems of heredity, the mystery of sex, of the phenomena 

 of reproduction and growth, the characteristics of habit, instinct, 

 and intelligence, and of the very meaning of life itself. Amid all the 

 maze of concrete facts that century after century keeps adding to 

 our store, these, and such as these, remain the great mysteries of 

 natural science — the magnalia naturae, to borrow a great word from 

 Bacon, who in his turn had borrowed it from St. Paul. 



Not that these are the only great problems for the biologist, nor 

 that there is but a single class of great problems in biology, for 

 Bacon himself speaks of the magnalia naturae, quoad usus humanos, 

 the study of which has for its objects "the prolongation of life or the 

 retardation of age, the curing of diseases counted incurable, the 

 mitigation of pain, the making of new species and transplanting of 

 one species into another," and so on through many more. Assuredly, 

 I have no need to remind you that a great feature of this generation 

 of ours has been the way in which biology has been justified of her 

 children in the work of those who have studied the magnalia naturae, 

 quoad usus humanos. 



But so far are biologists from being nowadays engrossed in practical 

 questions, in applied and technical zoology, to the neglect of its more 

 recondite problems, that there never was a time when men thought 

 more deeply or labored with greater zeal over the fundamental phe- 

 nomena of living things ; never a time when they reflected in a broader 

 spirit over such questions as purposive adaptation, the harmonious 

 working of the fabric of the body in relation to environment, and the 

 interplay of all the creatures that people the earth ; over the problems 

 of heredity and variation; over the mysteries of sex and the phe- 

 nomena of generation and reproduction, by which phenomena, as the 

 wise woman told, or reminded, Socrates, and as Harvey said again (and 

 for that matter, as Coleridge said, and Weismann, but not quite so 

 well) — by which, as the wise old woman said, we gain our glimpse of 

 insight into eternity and immortality. These, then, together with 



