ON BIOLOGY. 97 



though where facts constitute the ammunition used the 

 contest cannot be long prolonged. 



Your lecturer claims not to be quite as sanguine as 

 many another teacher in biology with whom he ha 

 acquaintance, but he has that faith in the rate at which 

 human thought is now moving to be fully of the opinion 

 that we have not very far to look into the future to be 

 enabled to see the time when the fundamental principles 

 and common facts of biology shall be taught, and prop- 

 erly taught, in every school of whatever size or scope, in 

 the country. It will then be thought quite as essential 

 for our growing youth to be familiar with the general 

 features of the anatomy and physiology of their own 

 bodies as it will be to be able to give the leading 

 Incidents of the war of 1812; and, perhaps, be considered 

 equally as practical. Moreover, in that time, when it 

 arrives, it will be considered quite as derogatory to tbe 

 name of a liberal education to have our youth ignorant of 

 the laws of descent as applied to all living organisms; of 

 the laws of distribution; and the names and general 

 habits of the fauna of his own land, as it will and now is 

 to have them ignorant of the main characters of the 

 earth's atmospheric envelop or the law of gravitation. 

 To me there is no better indication of an unbalanced, 

 one-sided education, at the present day, than to find 

 some young man more or less conversant with what his 

 physical geography has to teach him about the Arctic 

 Ocean currents, and, yet, at the same time, laboring 

 under the impression that the biggest creature that 

 habitually swims and lives therein the whale is "a 

 great fish;" whereas, any elementary text-book in zoolo- 

 gy, upon a moment's consultation will set him right, and 

 demonstrate the fact that a whale is no fish at all, but on 

 the other hand is just as much of a mammal as a horse 

 or an elephant, with all the main characteristics of a 

 mammal, even nursing its young at the breast. Yet 

 this is but one case, chosen for illustration, from among 

 hundreds of others. 



One of the greatest living expounders of modern 

 science, in speaking of the educational value of biology 

 in general and of physiology in particular, has said: 



"Biology needs no apologist when she demands a place 

 and a prominent place in any scheme of education 

 worthy of the name. Leave out the physiological sciences 

 from your curriculum and you launch the student into 

 the world undisciplined in that science whose subject- 

 matter would best develop his powers of observation; 



