An Introduction to a Biology 



as the lower animals ; nor of marvelling afc nature for having 

 evolved such wonderful creatures as ourselves. " What a 

 piece of work is man ! " we cry. Yes. What indeed ! What 

 sort of a piece of work should we think a clock that stopped 

 eight hours out of the twenty-four ? We get some idea of 

 how far we fall short of any satisfactory standard of activity 

 and endurance from the fact that when a mutation that 

 can dispense with sleep (Napoleon) does arise, he nearly 

 conquers the world single-handed. 



It is certain that we think we have a right to understand 

 things in nature. How many naturalists, when they have 

 arranged their oil immersion, peer down the microscope 

 and think that they alone are privileged to view the ultimate 

 structure of protoplasm ? 



The question whether life on this planet was created or 

 not does not matter. The point to insist on is that it was 

 not created by us. Yet we are continually acting as if it had 

 been. We believe that when we interpret a thing we are 

 seeing closer into it ; on the analogy of the clock. We forget 

 that we have not created the thing in nature. We look closer 

 into it and at first can see no works ; gradually we think 

 out what the works must be like ; we retain the image that 

 we invent of them in our minds, and then come away and 

 tell everyone we have discovered the works. Nageli and 

 Mendel both looked at the phenomenon of hybridisation. 

 Nageli saw only the face of the clock, and it meant nothing 

 to him. Mendel thought he could discover what the works 

 were like by the various things that happened on the face 

 of the clock, and it is true that his theory of the works corre- 

 sponds with what happens on the face. Yet he never saw 

 any part of the works. Have they any objective existence, 

 then, outside Mendel's brain ? Probably something faintly 

 like them has. The point I want to bring out is this. The 

 interpretation by man of a work of man (e.g. a clock) may 

 be said to consist in the shortening of the distance between 

 the eye of the observer and the thing observed. Is it so in 



247 



