184 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



tivity is in the air; it is so much in the air that it 

 becomes almost stifling at times; but even so, its 

 sphere so far has been the inorganic sciences, and bio- 

 logical relativity, though equally important, has been 

 little mentioned. 



We have all heard the definition of life as "one 

 damn thing after another"; it would perhaps be 

 more accurate to substitute some term such as 

 relatedness for thing. 



When I was a small boy, my mother wrote down in 

 a little book a number of my infant doings and child- 

 ish sayings, the perusal of which I find an admirable 

 corrective to any excessive moral or intellectual con- 

 ceit. What, for instance, is to be thought of a sci- 

 entist of whom the following incident is recorded, 

 even if the record refers to the age of four years? 



I (for convenience one must assign the same iden- 

 tity to oneself at different ages, although again it is 

 but a relative sameness that persists) — I had made 

 some particularly outrageous statement which was 

 easily proved false: to which proof, apparently with- 

 out compunction, I answered, ''Oh, well, I always 

 ex^gg-erate when it's a fine day. . . ." 



The converse of this I came across recently in a 

 solemn treatise of psychology: a small girl of five or 

 six, in the course of an ''essay" in school, affirmed 

 that the sun was shining and the day was fine; while 

 as a matter of fact it had been continuously overcast 

 and gloomy: on being pressed for a reason, she ex- 



