v.] VALUE OF NATURAL HISTORY SCIENCES. 75 



I wish to insist upon is, that this difference depends not on any 

 fundamental distinction in the sciences themselves, but on the 

 accidents of their subject-matter, of their relative complexity, 

 and consequent relative perfection. 



The Mathematician deals with two properties of objects only, 

 number and extension, and all the inductions he wants have 

 been formed and finished ages ago. He is occupied now with 

 nothing but deduction and verification. 



The Biologist deals with a vast number of properties of 

 objects, and his inductions will not be completed, I fear, for ages 

 to come ; but when they are, his science will be as deductive 

 and as exact as the Mathematics themselves. 



Such is the relation of Biology to those sciences which deal 

 with objects having fewer properties than itself. But as the 

 student, in reaching Biology, looks back upon sciences of a less 

 complex and therefore more perfect nature ; so, on the other 

 hand, does he look forward to other more complex and less 

 perfect branches of knowledge. Biology deals only with living 

 beings as isolated things treats only of the life of the indivi 

 dual : but there is a higher division of science still, which 

 considers living beings as aggregates which deals with the 

 relation of living beings one to another the science which 

 observes men whose experiments are made by nations one 

 upon another, in battle-fields whose general propositions are 

 embodied in history, morality, and religion whose deductions 

 lead to our. happiness or our misery, and whose verifications so 

 often come too late, and serve only 



&quot; To point a moral, or adorn a tale &quot;- 



I mean the science of Society or Sociology. 



I think it is one of the grandest features of Biology, that it 

 occupies this central position in human knowledge. There is 

 no side of the human mind which physiological study leaves 

 uncultivated. Connected by innumerable ties with abstract 

 science, Physiology is yet in the most intimate relation with 

 humanity ; and by teaching us that law and order, and a defi- 



