BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 



1303 



succession of these four distinctive sciences, mathematical, physical, 

 biological, and social, and to realise their own ascending complexity, 

 and their respective dependence upon their predecessors: so that 

 each (after the first) can only be substantially based and supported 

 by the extension of the preceding ones, so far as they can go towards 

 elucidating its problems and expressing their contributions in their 

 own distinctive ways. 

 The mathematician and the physicist have longest been working 



together, and thus peculiarly understand each other's bouads. But 

 the trouble begins when the statistician of biological phenomena, 

 and more of social ones, thinks as he has long done, indeed too often 

 still does, that these sciences are thus to be practically perfected, 

 and so only await his strictness in the matters he has still to count 

 and graph. Thus have arisen exaggerations of the claims and con- 

 clusions of biometrics. But far more serious and enduring have been 

 those of limiting the conceptions of economics — assuredly a social 

 science if ever there is to be one, and also dependent on physical 



