iii8 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



venture to suggest that the arrangement and contents of this 

 museum will he clearer if a kindred selection of its type-exhibits 

 be brought out to its own side of the corridor, with explanations of 

 their essential significance. 



Suppose these twofold attempts executed, and each at first made 

 from its own side: soon there appear strikingly interesting paral- 

 lelisms. Each may find the suggestions offered from the other side 

 at first not very encouragingly received, yet later being considered, 

 and sometimes applied; and these increasingly, as the humanists 

 and we find we can co-ordinate our ideas, as, for instance, ours of 

 organic evolution with theirs of progress and decline. And these 

 agreements become of greater mutual interest, when, as naturalists, 

 we tabulate the sub-sciences which are cultivated in biology, and 

 next find that the very like have all been in progress in social 

 studies, and from earlier times than have ours. In this case, the 

 sociological workers and their students may very naturally remark 

 that though our biological selections and interpretations have more 

 interest and suggestiveness than they — and still more their prede- 

 cessors — had reaUsed, they are also coming to see that we and our 

 biological predecessors have somehow learned, and even applied, 

 a good deal more from human studies than we knew; and so can 

 hardly have been such independent and detached observers and 

 interpreters as we had been accustomed to think. 



Leaving this and aU questions of mutual indebtedness and bor- 

 rowings, conscious or unconscious, for historic and biographic 

 inquiry, the essential matter is to get to agreement as to these 

 respective sub-sciences, biological and social respectively. For if 

 this be attained, we can both not only better arrange the parallelism 

 of our type-exhibits; but even condense and abstract all these anew; 

 and as it were into a closely analogous outline panel over our 

 respective doors (see end pages) . If and when this can be done, these 

 in turn aid, and even commit, each party towards making a clearer 

 selection and arrangement of his type-coUection, say in the corridor. 

 Indeed must not this become increasingly suggestive, towards the 

 arrangement of each museum, and helpful towards the teaching of 

 its fuller significance? For since all concerned on either side are 

 personally limited in practice to such subjects as they can pro- 

 ductively specialise in, it is all the more necessary to have thus 

 clearly before us also the special fields of others; and all these in 

 their necessary and intimate harmony, and even unity. We thus 

 come more and more to realise the harmony of biology and sociology 

 with each other; and these not only as collaborating in their studies 

 so much akin, as of life in evolution, but all these in an order con- 

 sistent with that of the preliminary and inorganic sciences as well. 

 In such ways we should have a sounder approach to the social 

 questions on which biologists are ever more actively entering; as to 



