MAGNALIA NATURAE: OR THE GREATER 

 PROBLEMS OF BIOLOGY 



BEING THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE 



ZOOLOGICAL SECTION OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION 



AUGUST 31sT 1911 



THE science of zoology, all the more the incorporate science 

 of biology, is no simple affair, and from its earliest beginnings 

 it has been a great and complex and many-sided thing. We 

 can scarce get a broader view of it than from Aristotle, for 

 no man has ever looked upon our science with a more far- 

 seeing and comprehending eye. Aristotle was all things that 

 we mean by ' naturalist ' or ; biologist.' He was a student 

 of the ways and doings of beast and bird and creeping thing ; 

 he was morphologist and embryologist ; he had the keenest 

 insight into physiological problems, though his age lacked that 

 knowledge of the physical sciences without which physiology 

 can go but a little way : he was the first and is the greatest 

 of psychologists ; and in the light of his genius biology 

 merged in a great philosophy. 



I do not for a moment suppose that the vast multitude 

 of facts which Aristotle records were all, or even mostly, 

 the fruit of his own immediate and independent observa- 

 tion. Before him were the Hippocratic and other schools 

 of physicians and anatomists. Before him there were name- 

 less and forgotten Fabres, Rcesels, Reaumurs, and Hubers, 

 who observed the habits, the diet, and the habitations of the 

 sand-wasp or the mason-bee ; who traced out the little lives, 

 and discerned the vocal organs, of grasshopper and cicada ; 



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