ON BIOLOGY. 3 



plicable through one great system of laws. Frequently 

 one of the abiological sciences is a most indispensable ad- 

 junct to the proper comprehension of one of the biological 

 sciences, and I can cite no better example than, the de- 

 pendence of physiology upon a thorough knowledge of 

 chemistry; and hardly, to a lesser extent, physics. For 

 instance, the study of the blood is an important chapter 

 in our work upon the investigation of the phenomena of 

 living matter; but the blood is made up of many chemical 

 constituents, and to understand the nature of its flow 

 through the vessels we must have recourse to the laws 

 demonstrated for us by the physicist. 



The question may be raised here, by anyone who has 

 not followed the growth of science for the last quarter of 

 a century, nor heeded the teachings of her earlier liter- 

 ature for a very considerably longer period of time, that 

 it appears to vhem that the laborers in those fields have 

 recently very sadly mixed up by these apparently new 

 classifications, what was formerly very clear to all under 

 the time-honored title of the "Natural History Branches." 

 This is not the case, however, and I will now proceed to 

 show you that many of the terms I have been using are 

 by no means new, and even the word biology itself was 

 first used by Lamarck in one of his works published in 

 1801, and that eminent naturalist meant to convey by the 

 term almost exactly what we do at the present time 

 nearly a century after he wrote it that is, a discourse 

 upon living things or upon life. 



Scientific thought, prior to the revival of learning in 

 Europe, was more or less completely under the sway of 

 the great impress made upon it by the immortal Greek 

 philosopher, Aristotle. Not that many other observers of 

 Nature and philosophical thinkers did not exist during 

 that long lapse of time, for that would not be true, but 

 what I do mean to imply is that however weighty were 

 the works of those others during the long sequence of 

 centuries before the revival of thought and learning, 

 the teachings in science as put forth by Aris- 

 totle powerfully dominated. Although Aristotle little 

 dreamed of the mutual dependence of the various depart- 

 ments of science, yet he was the first to place upon a sure 

 footing those methods of research which, during the ages 

 since his time, have led up to such a knowledge; in other 

 words, he was not only an original investigator but he 

 was a great comparer of those facts that were the fruits 

 of his investigations. He, in reality, established the first 

 school of comparative anatomy, or as it is now more 



