I 



BIOLOGICAL TKAINING AND STUDIES. 877 



suffering or death whicli anti-sanitary conditions entail, as surelv 

 as, though less palpably and rapidly than, a fire or a battle ; and I 

 might, if there were time for it, take my stand simply upon what is 

 measurable by money. This I will not do, as it is less pleasant to 

 speak of what has been lost than of that which has been or may be 

 gained. And of this latter let me speak in a few words, and under 

 two heads — the intellectual and the moral gains accruing from a 

 study of the Natural History Sciences. As to the intellectual gains, 

 the real psychologist and the true logician know very well that the 

 discourse on method which comes from a man who is an actual 

 investigator is worth, even though it be but short and packed 

 away in an Introduction or an Appendix, or though it cover but a 

 couple of pages in the middle of a book, like the ' Regulae Philoso- 

 phandi ' of Newton, more than whole columns of the ' Sophistical 

 Dialectic ' of the ancient Schoolman and his modern followers. ' If 

 you wish your son to become a logician,' said Johnson, 'let him 

 study Chillingworth ' — meaning thereby that real vital knowledge 

 of the art and science can arise only out of the practice of reasoning; 

 and as to the value of actual experimentation as a qualification for 

 writing about method, Claude Bernai-d and Berthelot are, and I 

 trust will long remain, living examples of what Descartes and 

 Pascal, their fellow-countrymen, are illustrious departed examples. 

 (See Janet, ' Revue des Deux-Mondes,' tome Ixii. p. 910, 1866.) 



I pass on now to say a word on the working of natural science 

 studies upon the faculty of attention, the faculty which has very 

 often and very truly been spoken of as forming the connecting-link 

 between the intellectual and the moral elements of our immaterial 

 nature. I am able to illustrate their beneficial working in pro- 

 ducing carefulness and in enforcing perseverance, by a story turning 

 upon the use of, or rather upon the need for, a word. Von Baer, 

 now the Nestor of biologists, after a long argumentation (' Mem. 

 Acad. Imp. Sci. St. Petersbourg,' 1859, p. 340), of the value which 

 characterises his argumentations generally, as to the affinities of 

 certain oceanic races, proceeds to consider how it is that certain of 

 his predecessors in that sphere, or, rather, in that hemisphere, as 

 Mr. Wallace has taught us Oceania is very nearly, had so lament- 

 ably failed in attaining or coming anywhere near to the truth. 

 This failure is ascribed to something which he calls ' Uugenirtheit/ 

 a word which you will not find in a German dictionary, the thing 



