November 24, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



585 



of phylogeny, certain aspects of homology, 

 etc.) were mistakenly supposed to be natural 

 laws, whereas in point of fact, at the best they 

 were only imperfect expressions of certain 

 inherent necessities of the philosophic principle 

 of organization, and 'at the worst just plain 

 buncombe. 



It is unfortunate that in the reaction against 

 this sort of thing which has occurred in the last 

 quarter- century the pendulum has swung so far 

 as to deprive the present day student of 

 biology of a good deal of the exact rigid 

 morphological training that he got in earlier 

 days. There never has been any better train- 

 ing for hand and eye and mind than that which 

 went with the getting of an adequate under- 

 standing of the comparative anatomy of the 

 vertebrates, no matter what field of biology the 

 student subsequently entered upon as a spe- 

 cialty. So generally inadequate is the training 

 in this field, now, I am told, that several of our 

 best medical schools have found it necessary to 

 devote a not inconsiderable part of the time 

 allotted to. anatomy in the medical curriculum, 

 to the study of vertebrate comparative anatomy, 

 because it is essential to the right understand- 

 ing of human anatomy, and the students do 

 not have it when they come, although they have 

 the bachelor's degree and have been required 

 to take biology. 



We have seen, in the biief sketch which has 

 so far been given of the course of biological 

 events, that two trends of thought and research 

 that were formerly of major importance have 

 on the whole fallen somewhat into a state of 

 desuetude. It will pay us to inquire a little 

 more carefully into the reasons for this change 

 of interest and esteem, because otherwise we 

 are apt to i^ach the erroneous conclusion that 

 taxonomy and morpholog}^ were never of any 

 real importance or significance in the develop- 

 ment of human knowledge, and that our fore- 

 fathers only deluded themselves in thinking 

 that they were. The fundamental reason for 

 the decline in the cultivation of these two 

 disciplines has already been touched upon. It 

 is found in the fact that taxonomy and mor- 

 phology, as originally practised in their pris- 

 tine purity, dealt solely with static aspects of 

 vital phenomena. Now the only thing of really 



compelling interest and significance about life 

 is its dynamic character. Organisms live and 

 do things. It is only this which makes them 

 more interesting than 'bricks or paving stones. 

 But by a curious quirk of the evolution of 

 intellectual matters, the only .group of people, 

 before the publication of the "Origin of Spe- 

 cies," who, as a group if they perceived this 

 somewhat obvious fact, did anything about it, 

 were the physiologists. 



The historical development of physiology 

 •was bound up with and a part of that of 

 medicine, rather than what we now call general 

 biology. The first systematic treatise pro- 

 fessedly dealing with physiology as an integral 

 part of general biology was Claude Bernard's 

 "P'hysiologie generale" and appeared only in 

 1872. The significance of this is that, in the 

 main, and with only a few notable exceptions, 

 those who prior to that time had been interested 

 in physiology had been almost wholly con- 

 cerned with workings of the mechanisms solely 

 of the human body, and even in this somewhat 

 narrow field, the significance of the findings for 

 the science and art of medicine held the fore- 

 most place in esteem. All this has, of course, 

 changed with the considerable development dur- 

 ing the last quarter of a century, of general 

 physiology under the leadership of such men as 

 Loeb in this country, Bayliss in England, and 

 Verworn in Germany. 



But at its best physiology concerns itself 

 chiefly with only certain of the internal dynamic 

 phenomena of living things, and this is only a 

 small part of the sum total of the activities 

 which constitute life. That all biology' should 

 primarily be concerned with dynamic matters 

 was fii'st brought powerfully to the attention 

 of thinlsiing men by Darwin. The significance 

 of Charles Darwin's work upon the intellectual 

 development of his and subsequent times has 

 been variously described and estimated. If we 

 go down to real fundamentals it seems to me 

 that we must conclude that one of the most im- 

 portant elements, at least, lies in the making it 

 so plain as never again to be misunderstood, 

 that the essential problems of biology are ques- 

 tions of dynamic relationships and not of static 

 phenomena. 



The immediate effect of Darwin's work, at 



