Animal"- 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



water-brooks are fitly designed to meet the 

 natural wants, so fitly does God implement 

 the spiritual need of man. It will be no- 

 ticed that in the Hebrew poets the longing 

 for God never strikes one as morbid, or 

 unnatural to the men who uttered it. It 

 is as natural to them to long for God as for 

 the swallow to seek her nest. Throughout 

 all their images no suspicion rises within us 

 that they are exaggerating. We feel how 

 truly they are reading themselves, their 

 deepest selves. No false note occurs in all 

 their aspiration. DRUMMOND Natural Law 

 in the Spiritual World, p. 245. (H. Al.) 



158. ANALOGY OF VEGETATION OF 

 OLD AND NEW WORLDS Unity of Nature. 

 Amid the colossal and majestic forms of 

 an exotic flora we feel how wonderfully the 

 flexibility of our nature fits us to receive 

 new impressions, linked together by a cer- 

 tain secret analogy. We so readily perceive 

 the affinity existing among all the forms 

 of organic life that, altho the sight of a 

 vegetation similar to that of our native 

 country might at first be most welcome to 

 the eye, as the sweet familiar sounds of our 

 mother tongue are to the ear, we neverthe- 

 less, by degrees, and almost imperceptibly, 

 became familiarized with a new home and a 

 new climate. As a true citizen of the world, 

 man everywhere habituates himself to that 

 which surrounds him; yet fearful, as it 

 were, of breaking the links of association 

 that bind him to the home of his childhood, 

 the colonist applies to some few plants in a 

 far-distant clime the names he had been fa- 

 miliar with in his native land; and by the 

 mysterious relations existing among all 

 types of organization, the forms of exotic 

 vegetation present themselves to his mind 

 as nobler and more perfect developments of 

 those he had loved in earlier days. Thus do 

 the spontaneous impressions of the untu- 

 tored mind lead, like the laborious deduc- 

 tions of cultivated intellect, to the same 

 intimate persuasion that one sole and indis- 

 soluble chain binds together all nature. 

 HUMBOLDT Cosmos, vol. i, int., p. 27. (H., 

 2897.) 



159. ANALYSIS A COMPLEX PROB- 

 LEM An Expert Alone Can Secure Needed 

 Data Must Know " Gathering -ground " of 

 Water. Accompanying the sample [of 

 water] should be a more or less full state- 

 ment of its source. There can be no doubt 

 that, in addition to a chemical and bacterio- 

 logical report of a water, there should also 

 be made a careful examination of its source. 

 This may appear to take the bacteriologist 

 far afield, and in point of fact, as regards 

 distance, this may be so. But until he has 

 seen for himself what "the gathering- 

 ground" is like, and from what sources 

 come the feeding streams, he cannot judge 

 the water as fairly as he should be able to 

 do. The configuration of the gathering- 

 ground, its subsoil, its geology, its rainfall, 

 its relation to the slopes which it drains, 



the nature of its surface, the course of its 

 feeders, and the absence or presence of cul- 

 tivated areas, of roads, of houses, of farms, 

 of human traffic, of cattle and sheep all 

 these points must be noted, and their influ- 

 ence, direct or indirect, upon the water care- 

 fully borne in mind. NEWMAN Bacteria, 

 ch. 2, p. 38. (G. P. P., 1899.) 



16O. ANATOMY AMONG SAVAGES 



Comparative Study of the Toes of the Os- 

 trich. The science of homologies, as de- 

 veloped by Cuvier and Hunter and Owen 

 and Huxley, is indeed an intricate, almost 

 a transcendental, science. Yet Dr. Living- 

 stone found the natives of Africa debating 

 a question which belongs essentially to that 

 science and involves the whole principle of 

 the mental process by which it is pursued. 

 The debate was on the question " whether 

 the two toes of the ostrich represent the 

 thumb and forefinger in man, or the little 

 and ring-finger." This is purely a question 

 of comparative anatomy. It is founded on 

 the instinctive perception that even between 

 two frames so widely separated as those of 

 an ostrich and a man there is a common 

 plan of structure, with reference to which 

 plan parts wholly dissimilar in appearance 

 and in use can nevertheless be identified as 

 " representative " of each other that is, as 

 holding the same relative place in one ideal 

 order of arrangement. ARGYLL Reign of 

 Law, ch. 4, p. 118. (Burt.) 



161. 



Practical Knowl- 



edge of. A moment's reflection will show 

 that all savages had a practical knowledge 

 of anatomy. They knew where to strike 

 with the club to paralyze the brain, to slash 

 with the cutlass for the shallow arteries, to 

 pierce with the spear to reach the fountain 

 of life. MASON Origins of Invention, ch. 

 8, p. 267. (S., 1899.) 



162. ANATOMY, COMPARATIVE 

 GIVES FULLER KNOWLEDGE OF MAN- 

 Likeness and Unlikeness of Lower Animals 

 to Man. Comparative anatomy and physi- 

 ology, by treating the human species as one 

 member of a long series of related organ- 

 isms, have gained a higher and more perfect 

 understanding of man himself and his place 

 in the universe than could have been gained 

 by the narrower investigation of his species 

 by and for itself. ... No doubt the 

 phenomena of intellect appear in vastly 

 higher and more complete organization in 

 man than in beings below him in the scale 

 of nature, that beasts and birds only attain 

 to language in its lower rudiments, and that 

 only the germs of moral tendency and social 

 law are discernible among the lower ani- 

 mals. Yet tho the mental and moral 

 interval between man and the nearest ani- 

 mals may be vast, the break is not absolute, 

 and the investigation of the laws of reason 

 and instinct throughout the zoological sys- 

 tem, which is already casting some scattered 

 rays of light on the study of man's highest 



