1294 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



to his interests, like the wood-pigeon, which destroys much grain; 

 and the herring-gull, too, is becoming mischievous to farmers. 

 Many are useful, as in destroying insects injurious to the farmer; 

 but let us recognise another aspect, that they minister to our life 

 of observation and thought, of feeling and esthetic emotion. What 

 an impoverishment of the poems of Burns and many another if all 

 the references to delightful living things were removed! Beautiful 

 birds and beasts form a spiritual asset, an irreplaceable part of our 

 heritage, of which we ought to be — far more than we are — the 

 jealous trustees. 



Thus, to sum up, from the anthropocentric point of view we may 

 distinguish in the Scottish Fauna: — 



(I) the big creatures used as food before there were domesti- 

 cated animals; 

 (II) the large carnivores: the primitive sifters; 



(III) the small furred creatures; 



(IV) marine animals and fishes in particular; 

 (V) the small food animals, such as the two species of hare ; 



(VI) the native pests like mice and voles, and the little creatures 



that are man's helpers, such as moles and hedgehogs ; 

 (VII) the esthetic treasures, birds in particular. 



BIOLOGY AND ETHICS 



In obeying the command to consider the lily and how it grows, 

 and this to flower, we of course do not credit it with any conscious- 

 ness, as we understand this. Yet in biology — even apart from that 

 psychology of the sub-conscious which can no longer be excluded 

 from the study of life, even from its simplest forms onwards — we 

 cannot at all understand our lily save as a development, in which 

 root, stem, and leaves, though at first seeming only concerned with 

 individual maintenance, bring forth flowers concerned with race- 

 continuance; and whereby the whole plant, thus fully grown, 

 attains a far further, fuller, and finer development of its own indi- 

 viduality as well. Hence, although the self -maintaining life at first 

 seems to proceed but on the lines of the individualistic economic 

 and utilitarian doctrines which attained such wide acceptance with 

 our industrial age and its competitive and militant outcomes, we 

 cannot but see these as but so many futilitarian misunderstandings 

 of the real process of organic life; and this even in its individual 

 development, as well as its racial evolution. For it is in this due and 

 necessary subordination of each and every individual life to that of 

 its progeny and species, that its essential and characteristic indi- 

 viduality is also attained. And since this method and process of 

 development, less or more fully expressed, is universal throughout 



