1398 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



the iron. Convenient^ then we may group the fundamental human 

 occupations along the valley section, with miner, woodman, 

 hunter, shepherd; and then cultivators, in their three forms of 

 agricultural development; from the hard upward reclamation by 

 the crofter, down to the finer development of gardener and 

 fruit-grower; and there seems little doubt that it was by the 

 extension of woman's hut-side garden-beginnings that our farming 

 of fields began. Space does not here allow any tracing of the 

 development of the hunter's solitary hut, the pastoral camp, 

 the crofters' hamlet, the poorer peasants' village, and the pros- 

 perous farmers' cross-road market- town; still less of the great 

 cities, so often ports. But their mingled homely and marketing origins 

 are clear; and next the tracing of all the many occupations in the 

 modern census, as developments, differentiations, and varied com- 

 binations of these few main and well-nigh fundamental ones, beyond 

 the primitive simplicity, of mere gathering, hunting, and fishing. 

 Here then are place, work, and people, in simplest outlines; from 

 which have arisen the division of intellectual labour of geographer, 

 economist, and anthropologist respectively, with their distinct 

 learned societies, their university departments too. That all this can 

 and does greatly advance these sciences, beyond this first geo- 

 graphico-economico-social outline, is obvious and unmistakable; 

 with the sheer multiplicity of observations in every field, this 

 division naturally continues. Yet, alas, it has come to division so 

 extreme that their three Societies are scattered in different parts of 

 their cit}'', and have but few members in common between any two 

 of them, and hardly ever, if at all, in all three: while similarly in 

 the University, their departments, professors, and students have too 

 commonly no co-operation of studies worth speaking of. 



SOCIAL ECONOMY. — Yet this is but a phase of the modern division 

 of labour, and shows signs of change. Thus economics increasingly 

 takes note of geography ; and each comes into touch with the histo- 

 rian; as he with pre-historian increasingly too, and the latter with 

 the modern anthropologist. Yet all these beginnings of co-opera- 

 tion have mostly arisen within recent memory, and are still far too 

 incomplete; so the practical question arises, can we not advance 

 it further; and even rapidly and effectively? — since only by syn- 

 thesis of all these studies can any living understanding of human 

 life in its evolution be obtained. Here, at length, is where our 

 bio-social parallelism claims fully to come in. We do not need to wait 

 until the remote Kalends when the geographical, economic, and 

 anthropological societies have finished their three main lines of 

 inquiry, each sub- specialised more and more finely. For us as 

 biologists, the synthesis is not remote at all; for its principle is in 

 our hands from the beginning, viz. that organism acts and reacts 



