582 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. LVI, No. 1456- 



into its own, and the security of its position in 

 the educational world can not be shaken even 

 by so doug-hty a Champion of the powers of 

 intelleetual darkness as Mr. Bryan. What has 

 happened in these twenty-five years in ibiology? 

 And what of the present and of the future? 

 Can we find in the efforts and achievements in 

 this field due warrant for that intellectual 

 respectability that biology has now gained, and 

 for that clear faith in the future which is im- 

 plied in Dr. John A. Lichty's splendid endow- 

 ment which we are here gathered to dedicate? 



Perhaps as good a method as any of getting 

 light on this matter will be to attempt a review 

 of the major trends of biology in the past and 

 the present. In doing this we shall find that 

 in every case these trends of thought and 

 research have been responses to some quite 

 naive and simple bit of intellectual curiosity, 

 of the sort likely to arise in a child's mind, if 

 he (turned his thought at all to living nature 

 about him. It may fairly be said that up to 

 the time of Darwin and Wallace and the 

 "Origin of the Species," all ibiology busied 

 itself with the answering of one phase or an- 

 other of the following two naive questions : 



First, how many and what different kinds of 

 animals and plants exist, or have existed, on 

 the face of the earth. 



Second, regarding living animals and plants 

 as ingenious and complex contrivances, but 

 after all not fundamentally unlike other con- 

 trivances, hoiw aie thsy put together and how 

 do 'they work? 



Every boy and girl who collects butterflies, 

 or who pulls a wasp to pieces in order to Iflcate 

 and with safety observe the behavior of i!s 

 "stinger," is in a rough and ready way repeat- 

 ing in his own development the history of the 

 growth of our present knowledge of biology. 

 He is trying on iHie one hand to get together a 

 collection of the different kinds of living things 

 about him, and on the other hand to inform 

 himself as to their structures and functions. 



Since the ptfolLcation of the "Origin of 

 Species" a third question, essentially just as 

 naive, 'but less easy to deal with objectively 

 and practically, has occupied a great part of 

 the attention and effort of biologists. But that 

 it indicates a sort of intellectual curiosity not 



essentially one bit more sophisticated than the 

 other two, is plain enough if we remember that 

 all peoples to the remotest historical time, and 

 including even savages, have not only thought 

 about it, but also have had theories about it. 

 This question we may put in this way: 



Third, whence, why, and how came the ani- 

 mals and plants which inhabit the earth to be 

 here at all? 



It is, as I have said, in an attempt to answer 

 these 'three questions, in some one or other of 

 their aspects, that all we know to-day about 

 biology has developed and igrown. It is an im- 

 pressive fact, recently discussed with great 

 brilliancy 'by James Harvey Robinson^ that 

 always in science, biology no less than all the 

 rest, the motivating problems which have led 

 to the advancement of knowledge have been 

 sim,ple naive questions about quite common- 

 place things. He says : 



Those to whom a commonplace appears to be 

 most extraordinary are very rare, but they are 

 very precious, since they and they alone have- 

 made our minds. It is they who have through 

 hundreds of tJiousands of years gradually en- 

 riched human thought and widened the gap that 

 separates man from his animal eoKgeners. With- 

 out them the mind as we know it would never 

 have come into existence. They are the creators 

 of human intelUgenee. The mass of mankind 

 must perforce wait for some speedally wide-eyed 

 individual to point out to them what they have 

 hitherto accepted as a matter of routine or failed 

 altogether to notice. These mind-makers are the 

 questioners and seers. We classify them roughly 

 as poets, religious leaders, morahsts, story- 

 tellers, philosophers, theologians, artists, scien- 

 tists, inventors. They all are discoverers and 

 pointers-out. What eludes the attention of others 

 catches theirs. They form the noble band of 

 woaderers. Conrmonly unnoticed things excite a 

 strange and compelling curiosity in them, and 

 each new question sets them on a new quest. 

 They see where others are blind, they hear where 

 others are deaf. They point out profundities, 

 complexities, involutions, analogies, differences 

 and dependencies where everything had seemed as 

 plain as a pike staff. 



Robinson, in what I have quoted, lays em- 



2 Eohinson, J. H. : " The Humanizing of 

 Knowledge," Science, N. S., Vol. 56, pp. 89-100^. 

 1922. 



