BIOLOGY AMONG THE SCIENCES 1137 



by Weismann as regards the distinctiveness of germ-cells from those 

 of the soma (body), and by Spencer for his antithesis of individuation 

 and reproduction. Again, starting from reproduction and sex, we 

 urge that upon this level, of the varied correlation of vegetative 

 and reproductive systems, we can better understand the evolution 

 of plants, and even apply this to the origin of species in animals; 

 as no longer simply in terms of favourable variations of germ or 

 soma, of cells, tissues, or organs, or of the fundamental physiological 

 (and even chemical and energic) processes which appear in all these, 

 but as now clearest in and between these two main systems, and 

 thence in the complete organisms which present them. Hence our 

 insistence on sex contrasts, not simply in the individuals of dioecious 

 forms, feminine and masculine respectively, as in a good many 

 plants and most animals, but also frequently suggestive of the 

 origin of distinct species, in the genera to which they belong — 

 witness sheep and goats, cattle and Indian buffaloes, or again of 

 divisions of larger groups — e.g. bees and wasps, moths and butter- 

 flies — aU these pairs being viewed as preponderatingly f eminoid and 

 masculoid respectively; while this general contrast, of more ana- 

 bolic and passive forms with those of more katabolic and active 

 diathesis, is traceable in larger groups throughout much more of 

 the animal kingdom. 



GROUP ARRANGEMENT.— From individual form and function, 

 as anatomy and physiology, we come to the corresponding synthetic 

 presentment of individual forms in their larger groupings. Here the 

 old naturalists, culminating in Buffon, were instinctively interested 

 above all in their "natural history" ways of life, that "larger 

 physiology" which we now call Ecology, and which has so fas- 

 cinating a literature in wellnigh every language, as notably for 

 English, from Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne up to 

 Darwin's naturalistic volumes, and many later ones. But for the 

 more difficult task of grouping animals not by their varied ways 

 of life, but by their essential form, Linnaeus' System of Nature laid 

 down his clearly observant, descriptive, and classificating technique 

 of classification, or Taxonomy — into varieties, into species, and 

 these into genera, orders, classes, sub-kingdoms, and kingdoms (and 

 finally Organisata), which, despite all modifications and re-inter- 

 pretations, is substantially permanent. 



Group and individual aspects of form and function thus give us 

 the four sub-sciences 



Taxonomy 



Structural < 



Anatomy 

 VOL. II DD 



Ecology 



1 Functional 



Physiology 



