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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIV. No. 875 



peasants, gathered up the lore and wisdom 

 of the bee. There were fishermen skilled 

 in all the cunning of their craft, who dis- 

 cussed the wanderings of tunny and mack- 

 erel, sword-fish or anchovy; who argued 

 over the ages, the breeding-places and the 

 food of this fish or that ; who knew how the 

 smooth dogfish breeds two thousand years 

 before Johannes Miiller; who saw how the 

 male pipe-fish carries its young before 

 Cavolini; and who had found the nest of 

 the nest-building rock-fishes before Gerbe 

 rediscovered it almost in our own day. 

 There were curious students of the cuttle- 

 fish (I sometimes imagine they may have 

 been priests of that sea-born goddess to 

 whom the creatures were sacred) who had 

 diagnosed the species, recorded the habits 

 and dissected the anatomy of the group, 

 even to the discovery of that strange heeto- 

 cotylus arm that bafSed Delia Chiaje, 

 Cuvier and Koelliker, and that Verany and 

 Heinrich Miiller reexplained. 



All this varied learning Aristotle gath- 

 ered up and wove into his great web. But 

 every here and there, in words that are 

 unmistakably the master's own, we hear 

 him speak of what are still the great prob- 

 lems and even the hidden mysteries of our 

 science; of such things as the nature of 

 variation, of the struggle for existence, of 

 specific and generic differentiation of form, 

 of the origin of the tissues, the problems of 

 heredity, the mystery of sex, of the phe- 

 nomena of reproduction and growth, the 

 characteristics of habit, instinct and intelli- 

 gence, and of the very meaning of life 

 itself. Amid all the maze of concrete facts 

 that century after century keeps adding to 

 our store, these, and such as these, remain 

 the great mysteries of natural science — the 

 Magnolia naturw, to borrow a great word 

 from Bacon, who in his turn had borrowed 

 it from St. Paul. 



Not that these are the only great prob- 



lems for the biologist, nor that there is even 

 but a single class of great problems in 

 biology. For Bacon himself speaks of the 

 magnalia naturce, quoad usus humanos, the 

 study of which has for its objects "the 

 prolongation of life or the retardation of 

 age, the curing of diseases counted in- 

 curable, the mitigation of pain, the making 

 of new species and transplanting of one 

 species into another," and so on through 

 many more. Assuredly I have no need to 

 remind you. that a great feature of this 

 generation of ours has been the way in 

 which biology has been justified of her 

 children, in the work of those who have 

 studied the magiialia natures, quoad usus 

 humanos. 



But so far are biologists from being now- 

 adays engrossed in practical questions, in 

 applied and technical zoology, to the neg- 

 lect of its more recondite problems, that 

 there never was a time when men thought 

 more deeply or labored with greater zeal 

 over the fundamental phenomena of living 

 things ; never a time when they reflected in 

 a broader spirit over such questions as pur- 

 posive adaptation, the harmonious working 

 of the fabric of the body in relation to en- 

 vironment and the interplay of all the crea- 

 tures that people the earth; over the prob- 

 lems of heredity and variation; over the 

 mysteries of sex and the phenomena of 

 generation and reproduction, by which 

 phenomena, as the wise woman told, or 

 reminded, Socrates, and as Harvey said 

 again (and for that matter, as Coleridge 

 said, and Weismann, but not quite so well) 

 — by which, as the wise old woman said, we 

 gain our glimpse of insight into eternity 

 and immortality. These then, together 

 with the problem of the origin of species, 

 are indeed magnalia naturce; and I take it 

 that inquiry into these, deep and wide re- 

 search specially directed to the solution of 

 these, is characteristic of the spirit of our 



