November 24, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



583 



phasis on the kind of man who sees the prob- 

 lem. Perhaps it may help by ever so little in 

 the production of such men in this laboratory 

 ■which we are starting on an enlarged career of 

 usefulness to-day, to emphasize the importance 

 for success in biology of 'being simple-minded. 



II 



Our first question about the different kinds 

 of living things which people this earth led to 

 the important branch of biology which is called 

 taxonomy or classification. This was for a 

 long time the dominant trend of the subject. 

 The fii-st step toward a proper knowledge of 

 the phenomenal world is obviously to get the 

 phenomena classified dn an orderly scheme. In 

 biology this takes the practical form of getting 

 different kinds of plants and animals described, 

 named and classified. Linnasus was able to 

 classify all the plants and animals known up 

 to 1735. Nowadays no one person would think 

 of attempting so colossal a task, and if he did 

 would fail by virtue of the inadequacy of the 

 human life span. Instead we find th^ worker 

 in the branch of 'biology to-day devoting his 

 life to one, or at most a few, groups of animals. 



From its onee dominant position taxonomy 

 has apparently fallen to-day, one must reluc- 

 tantly confess, into rather lower repute in the 

 mind of the general biological public. Neither 

 our professoi"s nor our students of biology ap- 

 pear, with a few brilliant exceptions, to be 

 interested in it. One forms the impression 

 that perhaps four fifths of the Ph.D.'s turned 

 out in zoology at 'the present time not only 

 never have, but probably never will, for them- 

 selves, identify an animal strange to them, and 

 as for deciding whether the unknown ci-eature 

 has been previously described, or placing it in 

 proper taxonomic relation to its nearest rela- 

 tives, such a problem would be 'as far 'beyond 

 their powers as it is beyond their desires. By 

 a curious paradox many modern ibiologists take 

 precisely that attitude towards and about the 

 living world around them in the practical con- 

 duct of their every day working life, which they 

 would logically be expected to take if it were 

 their deepest conviction ■that each living thing 

 were the product of an act of special creation — 



God-given and therefore not 'to 'be worried 

 about — and that such a process as evolution 

 had never occurred. 



Yet it is 'beyond question that if a young 

 man embarking on a biological career has a 

 desire to make an enduring contribution to 

 knowledge, of pei-manent value, and incapable 

 of 'being upset by any future developments of 

 the subject, 'his best chance of doing this lauda- 

 'ble thing is by becoming a careful, accurate 

 taxonomist. If 'he describes accurately, care- 

 fully and completely a hitherto undescribed 

 species of animal or plant, in such a way that 

 any one who reads carefully the description can. 

 recognize and identify the thing described, 'he 

 has chiseled for himself an indelible record in, 

 the history of man's intellectual progress. 



Some there are who will argue that while 

 what 'has just been said may ,be true, the niche 

 in the tablets of history carved in this way 'is 

 too slight to be of any significance, that, in 

 short, systematic or taxonomic work has only 

 a small and unimportant intellectual content, 

 as compared with other sorts of biological 

 study. Such a view of the case seems to me to 

 be singularly lacking in vision. It means that 

 the commonplace elements in taxonomic work 

 have been allowed to overwhelm in their view 

 its broad and deep significance. The labors of 

 the taxonomists have alone given us such pic- 

 ture as we have of the inter-relationships, unity 

 in diversity, and diversity in unity, of animate 

 nature as a whole. It is the systematist who. 

 'has furnished the bricks with which the whole 

 struetm-e of biological knowledge has been 

 reared. Without his la'bors the fact of organic 

 evolution could scarcely 'have been perceived, 

 and it is he who to-day really sets the basic 

 problems for the geneticist and the student of 

 experimental evolution. His facts are the raw 

 material from w'hi'ch the lavv's of organic evo- 

 lution, in the sense that we spea;k of physical 

 laws, must 'be worked out. An example of 

 what is apparently a real law of organic evo- 

 lution, deduced directly from the simplest 

 taxonomic statistics, is found in the fact that 

 the sizes of genera of plants and animals, as 

 measured by the num'ber of species eacij con- 

 tains, are not distributed in frequency accord- 



