CHAPTER X 



BIOLOGY AMONG THE SCIENCES 



Close beside the old biological laboratory where we are 

 writing, a wide corridor opens into two large museum halls, one 

 of zoology, and the other of archaeology, anthropology, and history; 

 and each is crowded with the accumulations of a succession of active 

 workers through many years past, into a veritable embarrassment 

 of riches, as most museums are. Our task in this book might thus 

 here be described as an endeavour to select from what the first of 

 these museums presents, and still more from what it suggests, as 

 an index to and reminder of the world of life beyond its walls; and 

 thus to express such main essentials of biology as our studies have 

 so far yielded us, and our limits of space permit. And since any and 

 every survey of life, pre-evolutionary or evolutionary alike, includes 

 man, as an animal, however much the highest, we have some place 

 for him here. Yet it next becomes attractive to ourselves, as well as 

 to our students and visitors, to enter the adjacent museum also; 

 with its copious further presentment of man's past and present, and 

 its varied indications of his life and doings in interaction with his 

 environment. Indeed as evolutionists we cannot but do this. Yet so 

 broadly conceived and illustrated an outline survey of human and 

 social life, as we are attempting for biology would obviously exceed 

 our limits, and powers. Our essential task is to outline our biological 

 world; so we are, as it were, bringing out into the public corridor, 

 and placing on the side next the zoological museum, a choice of 

 exhibits to indicate some of its main interests, with a few illustrative 

 selections from the adjacent botanical and palseontological museums 

 as well; and we are writing beside these such explanations and 

 interpretation as we can. 



Starting with simple organic forms, we have come last to man, and 

 necessarily in his animal aspect. Yet the biologic interests we have 

 here developed are not only morphological, palaeontological and 

 classificatory, physiological and developmental, etc., but ecological; 

 and thus so far social, and even psychological as well. We thus feel 

 attracted, and even prepared, indeed compelled, to enter the 

 adjacent museum, and note what it can teach us as biologists of 

 man's ways and doings, and thus of his simpler social ecolog37', and 

 of his psychology too. We find each of our biological sub-sciences 

 here further represented by social man, and this on a usually (though 

 not invariably) far more comprehensive and elaborate scale than 

 in the animal world. So next, after a little more familiarity, we 



