306 MAGNALIA NATURE: OR THE GREATER 



and who, together with generations of bee-keeping peasants, 

 gathered up the lore and wisdom of the bee. There were 

 fishermen skilled in all the cunning of their craft, who dis- 

 cussed the wanderings of tunny and mackerel, swordfish or 

 anchovy ; who argued over the ages, the breeding places and 

 the food of this fish or that ; who knew how the smooth 

 dogfish breeds, two thousand years before Johannes Miiller ; 

 who saw how the male pipefish carries its young, before 

 Cavolini ; and who had found the nest of the nest-building 

 rock-fishes, before Gerbe rediscovered it almost in our own 

 day. There were curious students of the cuttle-fish (I some- 

 times imagine they may have been priests of that sea-born 

 goddess to whom the creatures were sacred), who had diagnosed 

 the species, recorded the habits, and dissected the anatomy 

 of the group, even to the discovery of that strange hecto- 

 cotylus arm that baffled Delia Chiaje, Cuvier and Koelliker, 

 and that Verany and Heinrich Miiller re-explained. 



All this varied learning Aristotle gathered up and wove 

 into his great web. But every here and there, in words that 

 are unmistakably the master's own, we hear him speak of 

 what are still the great problems and even the hidden mysteries 

 of our science ; of such things as the nature of variation, of 

 the struggle for existence, of specific and generic differentia- 

 tion of form, of the origin of the tissues, the problems of 

 heredity, the mystery of sex, of the phenomena of repro- 

 duction and growth, the characteristics of habit, instinct, 

 and intelligence, and of the very meaning of Life itself. Amid 

 all the maze of concrete facts that century after century 

 keeps adding to our store, these, and such as these, remain 

 the great mysteries of natural science the magnolia natures, 

 to borrow a great word from Bacon, who in his turn had 

 borrowed it from St Paul. 



Not that these are the only great problems for the biologist, 

 nor that there is but a single class of great problems in biology. 

 For Bacon himself speaks of the tnagnalia naturce, quoad 



