80 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVII. No. 942 



any, he had to study medicine, taking his 

 degree in 1853. In 1872, however, things 

 had changed in Europe and when I went 

 to Strassburg to study I was the only stu- 

 dent in De Bary's laboratory who had 

 studied medicine. The others had begun 

 the special study of botany on entering the 

 university and were, although no older than 

 I was, much better trained in botany. 



In 1S66, there were very few botanical 

 professorships in this country, the salaries 

 were very small and the equipment verj^ 

 shabby. Gray was professor at Harvard, 

 D. C. Eaton at Tale and Porter at Lafay- 

 ette. Torrey, in spite of his distinction as 

 a botanist, really depended on his position 

 as a chemist for his living. The compara- 

 tively few positions in government and 

 state stations offered few attractions and 

 changes were frequent. To a young man 

 the prospect was not assuring. 



If we look further and ask what was the 

 attitude of the public towards natural sci- 

 ence, we find a state of things very diffi- 

 cult to appreciate at the present time. 

 This can be illustrated by my own experi- 

 ence as a school boy. When I was in the 

 high school one of the books we had to 

 study in the upper classes was Paley's 

 "Natural Theology." You may perhaps 

 infer from this that the object was to give 

 us religious instruction. Not at all. The 

 real object was to smuggle a little hiiman 

 anatomy into the schools. This was the 

 way it was done. Very few of you prob- 

 ably ever heard of Paley's "Natural Theol- 

 ogy," in its way a remarkable book. In 

 the opening chapter Paley supposes that a 

 man walking in the fields finds a watch on 

 the ground. He sees the complicated ma- 

 chinery adapted to a definite purpose and 

 therefore, according to Paley, at once in- 

 fers that it must have had an intelligent 

 creator. How much more strongly, there- 

 fore, should a contemplation of the organs 



of the human body, well adapted to per- 

 form special functions, lead us to believe 

 in the existence of an intelligent creator. 

 Paley then proceeds to give a rather mild 

 account of human anatomy illustrated by 

 plates intended to impress the readers -, a 

 ghastly head with the cheek dissected to 

 show the parotid gland; an abdomen with 

 the lid removed to show the bonbons in- 

 side, the stomach and spleen ingeniously 

 arranged so as to show also the deeper 

 lying organs, etc. Paley's reasoning does 

 not now seem altogether convincing. If 

 you or I had found the watch, we should 

 have seen that it was complicated and we 

 should have known that its purpose was to 

 show the time of day. We should have 

 known also that it had been made by a 

 watchmaker. If, however, a savage who 

 had never seen or heard of a watch had 

 found one in the field, he would have been 

 mystified by the mechanism and would not 

 have had the least idea what its purpose 

 was. Instead of recognizing an intelli- 

 gent creator he would have regarded the 

 watch itself as a god. 



Now, at the time of which I am speak- 

 ing, it would not have been proper to teach 

 anatomy as such in the schools, but anat- 

 omy, so far as it served to show the good- 

 ness and intelligence of the creator, was 

 quite legitimate. In other words in study- 

 ing natural history one must never forget 

 that God had made man to be the center of 

 the universe and all other things had been 

 arranged for the benefit of man, and, when 

 facts to the contrary appeared, they must 

 be properly interpreted or denied. Since 

 an omniscient and omnipotent being can 

 not make a mistake, all the species of plants 

 created in the beginning must forever re- 

 main as they were created. With this 

 simple theory of living things people were 

 perfectly contented until in 1859 the 

 "Origin of Species" fell like a bomb in 



