II40 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



locate all within the Milky Way, and this again in relation to nebulae 

 beyond. Like the anatomist and physiologist, he scans moon and 

 sun and planets to penetrate into their structure and composition 

 and their functioning; he reads back into our immeasurable past, 

 and forward into the future ; and thus is not only a palaeontographer 

 of the cosmos, but has long been discussing its evolution as well, 

 as from nebular hypotheses to the origins of our own earth, and of 

 its moon. So the geologist takes up the like inquiries, with his 

 minerals and rocks. So, too, and especially in our own day, for the 

 physicist and chemist, with their molar and molecular studies, and 

 their "atoms" now analysed anew; and their chemical formulae are 

 each a graphic morphology of form, yet also of functioning, and 

 these often serial, indeed evolutionary, in their way. So though bio- 

 mechanists, bio-physicists, and bio-chemists do great service to 

 physiology, albeit with claims sometimes excessive, even to exclu- 

 siveness. Prof. Whitehead's recent insistence on the complemental 

 need of projecting the concept of organismal life into physical pro- 

 cesses helps to redress the balance, and to justify that unity between 

 each group of sub-sciences above outlined as in the very nature of 

 things, and so of our thought of them. 



Criticisms of the Preceding Arrangement. — Logical, rational, 

 and practical though the above scheme of the biological sub- 

 sciences claims to be, it is yet open to an important criticism, a 

 further improvement. For it follows the older main line of biological 

 studies, which advanced earlier on the easier and more obvious 

 static lines of anatomy and taxonomy before reaching much of 

 physiology or even orderly ecology ; while similarly palaeontography 

 and embryography have been and are preliminary and helpful to 

 evolutionary studies proper, of group and individual, as phylogeny 

 and ontogeny. Yet biology has thus long been open to the reproach 

 of too much mere "necrography", and this perhaps for botany 

 especially, though now mainly as surviving prejudice. 



A long series of philosophers, each in his way as evolutionary 

 as his times or his knowledge allowed, might here be recalled as 

 taking the very opposite perspective; as from Heraclitus, with 

 his iravra pel — all things flow — to Bergson, with his elan vital, 

 his evolution creairice; and here, in this case clearest of all, Hegel, 

 with his insistence on "Becoming, Being, Having Been", Thus, as 

 evolutionists, we must reverse the order of our presentment of the 

 eight sub-sciences, to view the evolutionary sub-sciences at the 

 very outset, and in the order of life's own history; hence as — 



Phylogeny Ecology j Taxonomy Palaeontology 



Ontogeny Physiology j Anatomy Embryology 



