ON BIOLOGY. 59 



and facts constitute the most important, the mos*; practi- 

 cal and the most noble field into which men can throw 

 their best mental and physical energies. History has 

 long ago proved that however apparently a present-day- 

 discovered fact may seem to be of utter worthlessness, 

 owing to its non-applicability to utilitarian ends, such 

 facts invariably come into the very best play in the hands 

 of succeeding generations. Thousands upon thousands 

 of examples might be cited to sustain this statement, 

 drawing them from every department of human 

 knowledge. The only thing demanded is that the dis- 

 covery be a real truth, a living fact. Such discovered 

 facts have often lain idle for a generation or more when, 

 owing to later discoveries of, perhaps, a related kind, 

 they at last are brought into use with amazing power, and 

 frequently prove to be of lasting value and worth to all 

 humanity. 



Now, for more than a century past, the most extraor- 

 dinary thing about the discovery of biological facts is 

 that in the vast majority of instances, comparatively 

 speaking, they so rapidly come to meet some utilitarian 

 end in one or another line of human pursuits. 



In the first place very often the discovery of a new fact 

 in biology has the tendency to eradicate some wrong idea 

 and replace that wrong idea by the right one. The first 

 may have been entertained for ages, by men all over the 

 world, and have been the source of much bad practice 

 and, perhaps, of downright misery to generations of peo- 

 ple. No one for an instant will question the utility and 

 importance of this, inasmuch as ideas rule the world and 

 it is of the highest import that those ideas should be the 

 correct ones. In short the world can only be made happy 

 when truth prevails, and the foundations of all our 

 theories of things, all our practices and all our ideas are 

 governed by truth and fact. 



To instance my meaning, human history offers no bet- 

 ter example, as a whole, than the contest that has been 

 going on for ages between man, upon the one hand, and 

 the entire category of diseases and injuries to which his 

 organism is subject, upon the other. In the early history 

 of medicine and in the early history of humanity, hosts 

 upon hosts of men, women and children perished from 

 diseases, during every generation, from the sheer lack of 

 knowledge on the part of their fellows of what was the 

 correct thing to do for them. But what was worse than 

 all this, when men calling themselves physicians essayed 

 during those times to combat the results of injuries or 



