14 THE STORY OF LIFE'S MECHANISM. 



It is the attempt to explain the phenomena of 

 the living world by the same kind of natural 

 forces that have been adequate to account for 

 other phenomena, that has created modern 

 Biology. So long as students simply studied 

 animals and plants as objects for classification, as 

 museum objects, or as objects which had been 

 stationary in the history of nature, so long were 

 they simply following along the same lines in 

 which their predecessors had been travelling. 

 But when once they began to ask if living nature 

 were not perhaps subject to an intelligent ex- 

 planation, to study living things as part of a 

 general history, and to look upon them as active 

 moving objects whose motion and whose history 

 might perhaps be accounted for, then at once was 

 created a new department of thought and a new 

 science inaugurated. 



HISTORICAL GEOLOGY. 



Preparation had been made for this new 

 method of studying life by the formulation 

 of a number of important scientific discoveries. 

 Prominent among these stood historical geology. 

 That the earth had left a record of her history 

 in the rocks in language plain enough to be read 

 appears to have been impressed upon scientists 

 in the last of the century. That the earth has 

 had a history, and that man could read it, became 

 more and more thoroughly understood as the first 

 decades of this century passed. The reading of 

 that history proved a somewhat difficult task. 

 It was written in a strange language, and it 



