20 THE STORY OF LIFE'S MECHANISM. 



to offer to biologists no longer the complicated 

 problems which were associated with animals 

 and plants, but the same problems stripped of 

 all side issues and reduced to their lowest terms. 

 This simplifying of the problems proved to be an 

 extraordinary stimulus to the students who were 

 trying to find some way of understanding 

 life. 



NEW ASPECTS OF BIOLOGY. 



These three conceptions seized hold of the 

 scientific world at periods not very distant from 

 each other, and their influence upon the study of 

 living nature was immediate and extraordinary. 

 Living things now came to be looked upon not 

 simply as objects to be catalogued, but as objects 

 which had a history, and a history which was of 

 interest not merely in itself, but as a part of a 

 general plan. They were no longer studied as 

 stationary, but as moving phases of nature. 

 Animals were no longer looked upon simply as 

 beings now existing, but as the results of the 

 action of past forces and as the foundation of a 

 different series of beings in the future. The pre- 

 sent existing animals and plants came to be re- 

 garded simply as a step in the long history of the 

 universe. It appeared at once that the study of 

 the present forms of life would offer us a means 

 of interpreting the past and perhaps predicting 

 the future. 



In a short time the entire attitude which the 

 student assumed toward living phenomena had 

 changed. Biological science assumed new guises 



