BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1205 



there are trends in Organic Evolution which are in line with what 

 man at his best has always regarded as best. Nature is not against us, 

 but for us. 



MAN'S ATTITUDE TO SCIENCE 



Biological and other Science has long suffered from its appar- 

 ent detachment from all traditional outlooks. From homeliest and 

 most practical minds, to those of artistic and poetic vision, and to 

 philosophical and religious minds as well, science seems something 

 isolated from their living interests. And as all these minds have 

 something in common, and often more than appears, a consensus, 

 still far too general, has arisen of natural science as something 

 "dry". It seems inartistic and unpoetic, unpractical and thus useless, 

 and though it has been from time to time more or less considered 

 by philosophers, and now more than ever, this is still commonly 

 with a highly superior air. And till lately, also, it seemed irreligious, 

 as indeed to "fundamentalists" still. So far all these reasons and 

 more, there is little wonder that biology has still so little place, save 

 indeed in medicine, which practically each and all of the above 

 types, when they need its services have to accept and obey: but 

 seldom with understanding. 



No doubt all these estimates are improving. The practical man, 

 as agriculturist, begins to learn: as engineer, he is increasingly an 

 applied physicist; many manufacturers are also applied chemists, 

 and so forth. 



But the poet ! Though Wordsworth, Keats, and others have been 

 revolted by science, or rather what they took for it, there has been 

 a great succession of appreciations, such as those of Tennyson and 

 Emerson, Goethe and Meredith, and more. Ruskin, though at times 

 saying hard things, w^as a true naturalist-observer, as his best 

 passages of nature description and his exquisite drawings alike 

 show. And so, too, the painters he best loved, from Cox, Hunt, 

 Turner, to the Pre-Raphaelites, were all true naturalists in their 

 sympathetically observant way. 



There is from childhood in every naturalist something of that 

 nature-ecstasy and joy, that identification with Nature's life, 

 which Jefferies has so expressed in his autobiographic Story of My 

 Heart, though in later life this is only too readily depressed by the 

 habitual acceptance of the duller everyday life around him, or 

 repressed by too strictly intellectual or pedagogic routine — or 

 often both. 



BIOLOGY AND HEALTH 



AS THINGS ARE. — An impressionist biological survey of our 

 communities seems to forbid pessimism in regard to health. Children 



