ON BIOLOGY. 17 



We must not, however, measure the growth of the nat- 

 ural sciences too closely by the arbitrary scale of the cen- 

 tury, which is nothing more than a human estimate 

 invented for man's convenience in reckoning time. Bi- 

 ology has been a natural growth, like anything else, at 

 times being rapid and luxuriant and again sluggish and 

 uncertain, but ever independent of either B. C. or A. D., 

 or any other time-gauge of our devising. When at any 

 stage in the course of this growth it received into its 

 ranks the right kind of recruits, these latter came pre- 

 armed with the knowledge of much that had been done 

 before their joining; and in taking up the torches 

 of their predecessors, in their various spheres of action, 

 they nearly always succeeded in still further illuminat- 

 ing the conquered domain, and by their excursions into 

 the unknown added additional territory. Very often the 

 workers along some line, or upon a number of lines, have 

 been engaged for great lengths of time in simply gather- 

 ing in harvests of material and rendering descriptive ac- 

 counts of the same. Very little generalization is done; 

 and evidently without design the years roll by for a time, 

 and the entire corps of the world's naturalists appear to 

 have run Into an army of fact gatherers. Facts are 

 seized up and accumulated from all quarters, and are of 

 the most varied nature. Sometimes, from their very 

 remoteness from any apparent utilitarian ends, they for 

 the time have been regarded by many as practically val- 

 ueless; but we are bravely getting over such views of 

 any kind of true knowledge, for our experiences are 

 teaching us now that every real fact discovered and 

 comprehended far from being useless is sure some day to 

 have its place found for it in the grand structure of 

 human understanding of the scheme of the universe. 

 Frequently such facts build up a philosophy for one age, 

 which is more than likely to become the common sense 

 of the next succeeding one. Explorers, traders in foreign 

 seas, material gatherers and the describers of museum 

 material, zoological artists and popular writers on natural 

 history, together with here and there occasionally a 

 stronger hand and more far reaching researches, were a 

 long, long time filling the biological magazine for some 

 great digester of the whole, some great mind and hand to 

 sum up in orderly arrangement the grand total of results 

 attained; to make an epoch; to spread a broad, solid base 

 for the succeeding host of investigators to rest upon. We 

 have already seen how a Linnaeus arose, nearly two hun- 

 dred years ago, as the transcendent systematizer of the 



