THE VOICE OF THE DESERT ] 26 



because he had at hand everything w^hich nature affords 

 for use or pleasure, and that Adam's first duty in this "com- 

 plete natural-history collection," v^as "to regard the Cre- 

 ator's v^ork." It v^as^ — as Linnaeus does not add — too bad 

 that w^hen he named each according to its kind he did not 

 realize the usefulness of the binomial system. 



At other times even Linnaeus was somev^hat troubled 

 by the question v^hether tv^o plants or animals which dif- 

 fered only shghtly had, nevertheless, been to just that de- 

 gree distinct since the fifth day of creation. He was, in 

 other words, troubled by the need for a definition of 

 "species," even if it was to be taken for granted that species 

 had never changed. A century later Darv^n's imagination 

 and reason boggled at the assumption that God had cre- 

 ated a special creature to live only on one rocky island in 

 the Galapagos, a different one to live only on a neighbor- 

 ing island. But either God had gone to that pointless 

 trouble or species were not fixed. 



In any event, the flora and fauna of the world had to be 

 described and catalogued, and then some theory of how 

 the individual species of that flora and fauna had Come 

 into existence had to be formulated', before men could be- 

 gin to study intelligently these various flora and fauna as 

 self-contained entities or to ask how they had become 

 estabhshed where they are. And it is a curious fact that 

 biology began to be especially concerned with such 

 questions at about the same time that sociology began to 

 attract more and more attention among the students of the 

 human animal. In some respects the cases are quite paral- 

 lel. Ecology, the study of plant and animal associations, is 

 merely the sociology of the whole plant and animal world. 

 The biologist's shift of interest in the direction of ecological 



