1454 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



departments alike, have here before them — quite Hterally and fully — 

 "the chance of their lives". In this way, too, we shall soon be seeing 

 more biological laboratories in the schools, beside their present 

 chemical, mechanical, and sometimes even physical ones. Thus a 

 needed and great development of the educational ladder; moreover, 

 in the Universities the value and significance of the biological 

 sciences, as the essential link, too long missing, between the sciences 

 and the humanities, will become far more clear than hitherto to 

 their respectively too exclusive exponents. And, of course, also to 

 the public. The age of biology, and of sociology also, will then have 

 adequately come. Till then we are but in the day of small things. 



BIOLOGISTS AND BIOLOGY.— With nature-studies actively in 

 progress, and regional life-surveys extending with opportunities of 

 travel, naturalists go on happily, finding fresh things and seeing 

 them in new lights, even in old age ; thus verifying Meredith's good 

 saying: "Observation is the most enduring of the pleasures of life." 

 Grey and wrinkle-eyed as they become, they are still the same boy- 

 naturalists as ever, the same student-ramblers, questing from moor 

 to shore. Earlier interests continue and develop: one goes on 

 watching his birds, another his ilowers. Breadth of nature-interests 

 need not be lost; the zoologist is all the better for being a garden- 

 lover, and the gardener-botanist may find his best opportunities in 

 planning Zoos. Thus neither loses bight of the plant or the animal 

 world; each is kept awake to biology in its twofold comprehensive- 

 ness. For though specialised interests must needs diverge as they 

 develop, these are now less prosecuted as the too isolated specialisms 

 into which the sciences too readily fall to pieces, as well as asunder : 

 they are also conspecialisms, since more and more realised amid 

 the interactions of Nature and in the interchange of minds. 



Here two little anecdotes of Darwin may make this normal 

 naturalist's progress more vivid. One day, many years ago, the 

 writer of this section — then an assistant to Burdon Sanderson and 

 Schafer at University College — ^was amusing a spare hour by 

 searching a pond-sample with his microscope, and had drawn a 

 comparative blank, mth only two or three common green Euglenas 

 swimming amid a few motile baciUi. He was about to put this slide 

 away for a fresh dip, when he was gently pushed aside. A big beard 

 came over his shoulder — here was Darwin! who had come in 

 unnoticed. He said nothing, but looked closely into this — to me — 

 barren microscope-field: then suddenly broke out, positively shout- 

 ing for joy: 'T say! They're moving, they're moving! Sanderson! 

 Sanderson! Come and see; they've moving! Look at that!" 



Was not here a vivid and memorable lesson in biology — this 

 literally Pan-ic intoxication of ecstasy, in our oldest of veterans, 

 greatest of masters, before this simplest spectacle of Life ! 



