FIFTY YEARS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 19 



life lengthened b}^ months through efforts initially his own; 

 and both medicine and surgery have been reconstructed. 

 Entomology has traced the laws governing insect life, sug- 

 gesting methods of successfully opposing physical force to 

 insect activity, and even of opposing insect to insect in such 

 manner as to protect and multiply the crops on which the 

 nations are fed. Phytology has made clear the laws of plant 

 life, indicating ways of fertilizing and hybridizing and even 

 reproducing useful plants — ways more economical than 

 those of nature; while zoology is daily applied in re-creating 

 and perpetuating needful domestic animals. The science of 

 living things is too broad and its Hues are too many for 

 full statement in a brief summary; but its results may be 

 summed up in saying that it has taught man to control life 

 almost at will — annihilating it if bad, and preserving it 

 if good — and has enabled him to subjugate vitahty to his 

 needs even more completely than the physical forces are 

 subjugated. As a science simply, biology abounds in prob- 

 lems of profound interest; as an applied science, its uses 

 and benefactions are incalculable. 



Half a century ago a shadow obscurea a considerable 

 part of the field of science, seriously obstructing its culti- 

 vation; it was the shadow cast by man himself, then held 

 too sacred to serve as suitable subject for scientific research. 

 In 1863 Huxley pubhshed Man's Place in Nature, and an 

 anthropological society was instituted in London and began 

 the issue of a journal; eight years later Darwin published 

 The Descent of Man. These events marked the gradual 

 lifting of the shadow from science, the slow extension of the 

 law of the uniformity of nature to the human organism. 

 Contributions came from other countries; Herbert Spencer 

 bent his fertile mind and facile pen to inquiry and exposi- 

 tion; America awoke rapidly; and within a quarter century 

 anthropology was regularly classed as one of the sciences. 

 At first man was studied simply as an animal, and men were 

 classed in races defined by characters shared mth brutes. 

 A notable advance was forecast when students perceived 

 that man occupies a distinct plane, in that his essential attri- 

 butes are collective rather than individual; and the American 



