RECENT DEVELOPMENT OF BIOLOGY 23 



taught, we may hope to see superstition and all its consequences 

 disappear, but not before this. 



As far as the influence of the applied sciences on ethics is con- 

 cerned, I think we may hope that through the natural sciences the 

 ethics of our political and economical life will be altered. In our 

 political as well as our economical life we are still under the influ- 

 ence of the ancients, especially the Romans, who knew only one 

 means of acquiring wealth, namely, by dispossessing others of it. 

 The natural sciences have shown that there is another and more 

 effective way of acquiring wealth, namely, by creating it. The 

 way of doing this consists in the invention of means by which the 

 store of energy present in nature can be more fully utilized. The 

 wealth of modern nations, of Germany and France, is not due to 

 their statesmen or to their wars, but to the accomplishments of the 

 scientists. It has been calculated that the inventions of Pasteur 

 alone added a billion francs a year to the wealth of France. In the 

 light of such facts it seems preposterous that statesmen should con- 

 tinue to instigate war simply for the conquest of territories. Through 

 modern science the wealth of a nation can be increased much more 

 quickly than through any territorial conquest. We cannot expect 

 any change in the political and economical ethics of nations until 

 it is recognized that the lawmakers and statesmen must have a 

 scientific training. If our lawmakers possessed such a training, they 

 would certainly not have allowed one general source of energy 

 after another, such as oil-fields, coal-fields, water-power, etc., to be 

 appropriated by individuals. All these stores of energy belong just 

 as well to the community as the oxygen of the air or the radiating 

 energy of the sun. Our present economical and political ethics is 

 still on the whole that of the classical period or the Renaissance, 

 because the knowledge of science among the masses and statesmen 

 is still on that level, but the natural sciences will ultimately bring 

 about as thorough a revolution in ethics as they have brought 

 about in our material life. 



IX. Experimental Biology as an Independent Science 



If we compare the development of biology w r ith the simultaneous 

 development of physics and chemistry during the last twenty years, 

 we must be impressed by the fact that during that time the great dis- 

 coveries in physics and chemistry have followed each other surpris- 

 ingly fast. The discovery of the law of osmotic pressure, the theory 

 of electrical dissociation, the theory of galvanic batteries, the sys- 

 tematic formulation of physical chemistry, the discovery of electrical 

 waves, the discovery of the X-rays, the discovery of the new elements 

 in the air, the discovery of radioactivity, the transformation of ra- 



