1336 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



has become equilibrated into permanence in warm-blooded ones; 

 and to their obvious advantage in fuller and more vigorous life; 

 witness the amazing superiorities so manifest in the superlatively 

 hot-blooded birds, not only over the ancestral reptilian stock, but 

 also over the relatively much less hot-blooded mammals. Our own 

 slight rises of temperature, as normally with activity, may be 

 exaggerated, even to fever, and this to delirium and death, at a 

 temperature still well below those normal to birds : yet how can we 

 imagine a rise in normal temperature of our own species, or any 

 other, save as a fevering, equilibrated anew to normal? And since 

 rise of psychic activity is also associated with increased brain- 

 circulation, with nervous and other waste, may we not see, even in 

 their pathological exaggerations, something of the same interpreta- 

 tion — of instable advance ? May not various types of insanity, even 

 though rising at times to mania, despite their survival disadvantages, 

 also include something of pioneering towards favourable variation? 

 The high qualities of mind and spirit often associated with phthisis 

 may here similarly be recalled. May not even the current eugenistic 

 dread of taint from families which have presented any form of 

 mental, cerebral, or nervous trouble, also be pushed too far? For 

 without at all falling into Nordau's exaggeration, which almost 

 identified genius with insanity, there have been many cases of such 

 association. There are surely only too stable types, to which an 

 infusion of cerebral variability might well be oftener of advantage, 

 rather than the reverse. In short, the idea is not too lightly to be 

 dismissed that potentially favourable variations may begin more or 

 less pathologically, since disturbing to the general balance ; yet that 

 these may be, and sometimes are, equilibrated, and with advantage 

 to the individual, in later life — and even offspring. In fact, this idea 

 has come up from time to time since Sutton's notable initiative 

 and we were not a little surprised to find something of this 

 conception reappearing even in a recent volume on Cancer. As 

 naturalists without pathological and medical experience, we are 

 not qualified to pronounce in such matters, yet we cannot but see 

 rationality in the idea, that some forms at least of pathological 

 variation may be instable new variations capable of equilibration, 

 and to vital advantage of the individual; or even with adjustment 

 in progeny? 



SOME BIOLOGICAL VIEWS ON EDUCATION 



More than other men of science, except psychologists, biologists 

 may reasonably make a strong claim to be heard in regard 

 to education. For they are students of development, and education 

 is the guidance of development. Biologists are concerned with the 



