NECESSITY OF A DOCTRINE, 99 



" troublesome foreground " of boys and girls, fighting, laugh- 

 ing, jeering, beating tin kettles, and otherwise exhibiting 

 the moderate sensibility of their fibre religieux ; but the 

 background of men and women (of course with babies) was 

 more orderly. 



They listened in respectful silence, but with no appearance 

 of S3nnpathy. A grey-haired fisherman standing beside me 

 said to a woman at his left : " He doesn't speak acconling 

 to Scripter. Some things is according to Scripter ; but 

 some is not." He spoke in a quiet assured tone of authority, 

 and his was the only criticism I heard. 



This is a digression, and has only a remote connection with 

 the imperfect logic of zoologists, a subject on which, if I had 

 gi-eater authority, I would discourse at length. Not that 1 

 suppose zoologists to be less logical than other men ; but 

 simply that the Science of Life being so much more difficult 

 than any of the Physical Sciences, it is more in need of a 

 rigorous code of principles ; whereas at present the Astro- 

 nomer, the Physicist, and the Chemist, are subject to re- 

 straints which the Biologist seldom condescends to regard. 

 No speculative Chemist is allowed to call a substance an acid 

 which will unite with no base, which exhibits none of the 

 properties of an acid ; no Physicist is allowed to assume the 

 existence of electricity, where none of the conditions of elec- 

 tricity exist, and none of the phenomena (except those to be 

 explained) are manifest. But we who study Biology in any 

 department, whether Physiology, Zoology, or Botany, are 

 allowed by the laxity of current practice, and the want of a 

 doctrine, to call a coloured spec an eye, in the absence of all 



