Biology and Mathematics 



DR. GEORGE BRUCE HALSTED 



That which is most characteristic of the present epoch in the 

 history of man is undoubtedly the vast and beneficent growth 

 of science. 



In things apart from science, other races at times long past 

 ma}^ be compared to the most civilized people of today. 



The lyric poetry of Sappho has never been equaled. The 

 epic flavor of Homer, even after translation, comes down to us 

 unsurpassed through the ages. 



Dante, the voice of ten silent centuries, may wait another 

 ten centuries before his maedieval miracle of song finds its peer. 



The Apollo Belvidere, the Venus of Milo, the Laocoon are 

 the glory of antique, the despair of modern sculpture. To men- 

 tion oratory to a schoolboy is to recall Demosthenes, and Cicero, 

 even if he has never pictured Caesar, that greatest of the sons 

 of men, quelling the mutinous soldiery b}^ his first word, or with 

 outstretched arm, in Egypt's pd.lace window, holding enthralled 

 his raging enemies, gaining precious moments, time, the only 

 thing he needed to enable him to crush them under his dominant 

 intellect. 



There is no need for multiplying examples. The one thing 

 that give 5 the present generation its predominance is science. 



All criticisms of life made before science had taken its pres- 

 ent place, or attempting to ignore its prominence are obsolete, 

 as are of necessity any systems founded on pre-scientific or 

 anti-scientific conceptions. 



Now the latest of the great sciences is biology, and it could 

 be so widely interpreted as to include many of the others, for 

 example, physiology, psychology, sociology; but chiefi.y it takes 

 for itself the broad general beginnings. 



These older sciences were really engaged upon narrow 

 domains, narrow ramifications in the universe of biology; and 

 the general has helped the pre-existent special by giving the 

 broader conceptions connoted by comparative physiology, 

 comparative psychology, comparative sociology. 



