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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 978 



It is well for people to understand this 

 definite limitation of scope quite clearly, 

 else they wrest the splendid work of biol- 

 ogists to their own confusion — helped, it 

 is true, by a few of the more robust or less 

 responsible theorizers, among those who 

 should be better informed and more care- 

 fully critical in their philosophizing ut- 

 terances. 



But, as is well known, there are more 

 than a few biologists who, when taking a 

 broad survey of their subject, clearly per- 

 ceive and teach that before all the actions 

 of live things are fully explained, some 

 hitherto excluded causes must be postu- 

 lated. Ever since the time of J. R. Mayer 

 it has been becoming more and more cer- 

 tain that, as regards performance of work, 

 a living thing obeys the laws of physics, 

 like everything else; but undoubtedly it 

 initiates processes and produces results 

 that without it could not have occurred — 

 from a bird's nest to a honeycomb, from a 

 deal box to a warship. The behavior of a 

 ship firing shot and shell is explicable in 

 terms of energy, but the discrimination 

 which it exercises between friend and foe 

 is not so explicable. There is plenty of 

 physics and chemistry and mechanics about 

 every vital action, but for a complete un- 

 derstanding of it something beyond physics 

 and chemistry is needed. 



And life introduces an incalculable ele- 

 ment. The vagaries of a fire or a cyclone 

 could all be predicted by Laplace's cal- 

 culator, given the initial positions, veloci- 

 ties and the law of acceleration of the mole- 

 cules; -but no mathematician could calcu- 

 late the orbit of a common house-fly. A 

 physicist into whose galvanometer a spider 

 had crept would be liable to get phenomena 

 of a kind quite inexplicable, until he dis- 

 covered the supernatural, i. e., literally 

 superphysical, cause. I will risk the asser- 

 tion that life introduces something incal- 



culable and purposeful amid the laws of 

 physics; it thus distinctly supplements 

 those laws, though it leaves them otherwise 

 precisely as they were and obeys them all. 



We see only its effect, we do not see life 

 itself. Conversion of inorganic into or- 

 ganic is effected always by living organ- 

 isms. The conversion under those condi- 

 tions certainly occurs, and the process may 

 be studied. Life appears necessary to the 

 conversion, which clearly takes place under 

 the guidance of life, though in itself it is 

 a physical and chemical process. Many 

 laboratory conversions take place under the 

 guidance of life, and, but for the experi- 

 menter, would not have occurred. 



Again, putrefaction, and fermentation, 

 and purification of rivers, and disease, are 

 not purely and solely chemical processes. 

 Chemical processes they are, but they are 

 initiated and conducted by living organ- 

 isms. Just when medicine is becoming 

 biological, and when the hope of making 

 the tropical belt of the earth healthily 

 habitable by energetic races is attracting 

 the attention of people of power, philoso- 

 phizing biologists should not attempt to 

 give their science away to chemistry and 

 physics. Sections D and H and I and K 

 are not really subservient to A and B. 

 Biology is an independent science, and it is 

 served, not dominated, by chemistry and 

 physics. 



Scientific men are hostile to superstition, 

 and rightly so, for a great many popular 

 superstitions are both annoying and con- 

 temptible; yet occasionally the term may 

 be wrongly applied to practises of which 

 the theory is unknown. To a superficial 

 observer some of the practises of biologists 

 themselves must appear grossly supersti- 

 tious. To combat malaria Sir Ronald Ross 

 does not indeed erect an altar; no, he oils a 

 pond — making libation to its presiding 

 genii. What can be more ludicrous than 



