yt 
220 Foster: Integration tn Science. 
method ; he will not use that method long before he finds that 
he is ckeipiting with questions which belong to the phy siologist 
that the problems presented by the actions of the individual 
being, when these are pushed beyond a certain limit, carry him, 
as he seeks their solution, beyond the individual to the race, 
and land him in the same questions as those with which the 
morphologist has met. And the taxonomist is finding, or rather 
has found these many years past, that the affinities of animals or 
of plants, as they are determined by, so are they to be judged 
by a knowledge of, things which it is the province of the 
morphologist and the physiologist to make clear. 
One, and perhaps not the least part of the many-sided good 
which Charles Darwin brought to biologic science was that the 
views which he made known have already served and promise to 
serve still more in the future as a chain, a golden chain, binding 
together the several branches of biologic study. The three 
great divisions of biology—morphology, physiology, and 
taxonomy — however divergent they may have been during 
the past, and may still seem to be, give promise of uniting 
again when they near their ultimate goal; for that is one and 
the same for each of them. Whether you busy yourself with 
questions of form and structure, or of action and function, or of 
_ affinities and relationships, your inquiries all tend to the ultimate 
question how and in what way have all the phenomena of life 
come about? How did life originate? How is it renewed? 
And how in its origin and its renewal has it embodied itself 
in the long series of living beings, presenting differences of 
form and differences of function, and yet arranged in an order . 
marshalled by some pogo or other? It is one, I say, 
of the many merits of rwin’s work, that he anticipated, 
in a way, t the final union ‘of the three chief biologic studies. 
The origin of species is, by its very enunciation, a zoological 
problem, but the appearance of a variation is essentially a 
morphological problem, while the influence of the struggle for 
- existence on the variation is no less a problem of physiology; 
a problem of physiology, however, in the wide sense of that 
‘word, not a problem merely of the limited mechanical physiology 
of the schools. In that wider sense physiology means the 
influence of circumstances of the surrounding world on the 
Organism as well as the influence of the organism on the sur- 
rounding world. Whether we seek for confirmation or for 
refutation of the particular thesis put forward by Darwin, we 
talent neti, 
Naturalist, 
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