26 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



tinguished from those that are not Hving. This would be all very 

 well, so long as we confined ourselves to plants and the lower ani- 

 mals, but you will at once see that we should be landed in consid- 

 erable difficulties when we reached the higher forms of living things. 



For whatever view we may entertain about the nature of man, 

 one thing is perfectly certain, that he is a living creature. Hence, 

 if our definition is to be interpreted strictly, we must include man, 

 and all his ways and works too, for that matter, under the head of 

 Biology, in which case we should find psychology, politics and po- 

 litical economy, all absorbed into the province of Biology. 



We should consider, for instance, our friend Mr. Mcllwraith to 

 be quite inside the Biological fence if he were to refer, as he often 

 does, to bird calls and bird notes, or bird music, when he discourses 

 to us about his feathered favorites — in fact, a paper from him on 

 that particular subject, so very interesting, would be quite within 

 the scope of the work of the Section under review — but, if any mem- 

 ber were to introduce the subject of human language, or man's ftiusir, 

 we should at once have the Philological Section, led by our worthy 

 Secretary, telling us that we were on foreign soil in meddling with 

 this subject ; and no doubt Mr. Aldous would hint that in introduc- 

 ing such a subject as ma?i's music into the Biological Section we 

 were at least not in harmony with modern scientific usage, but 

 would also suggest that the place for it was in the music department 

 of the Art Section, a section as yet unrepresented in our Society, 



In strict logic it may be hard to object, for have not the lower 

 animals their economy and their polity? — and if, as is always ad- 

 mitted, the polity of bees and the commonwealth of wolves fall 

 within the scope of the biologist proper, it surely becomes hard to 

 say why we should not include therein human affairs, which in so 

 many cases resemble the bees in zealous getting, and are not without 

 a slight likeness to the proceedings of the wolves. 



However, there has been a sort of practical understanding by 

 which biologists give up to a different branch of science what Bacon 

 or Hobbes would have called Civil History. This self-sacrifice can 

 well be afforded, inasmuch as, on a moderate estimate, there are 

 over a quarter of a million of different species of animals and plants 

 to know all about, so that you see this section has territory more 

 than enough for the next century or two, at least. 



If we had not come together this evening to have a sort of field 



