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BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF 

 SCIENCE, PORTSMOUTH, 1911. 



ADDRESS TO THE ZOOLOGICAL SECTION. 

 By Professor D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, C.B., President of the Section. 



Magnalia Natue^ ; or, The Greater Problems op Biology. 



The science of Zoology, all the more the incorporate science of 

 Biology, is no simple affair, and from its earliest beginnings it has 

 been a great and complex and many-sided thing. We can scarce get 

 a broader view of it than from Aristotle, for no man has ever looked 

 upon om" science with a more far-seeing and comprehending eye. 

 Aristotle was all things that we mean by " naturalist " or " biologist." 

 He was a student of the ways and doings of beast and bird and 

 creeping thing ; he was morphologist and embryologist ; he had the 

 keenest insight into physiological problems, though lacking that 

 knowledge of the physical sciences without which physiology can go 

 but a little way : he was the first and is the greatest of psychologists ; 

 and in the light of his genius biology merged ia a great philosophy. 



I do not for a moment suppose that the vast multitude of facts 

 which Aristotle records were all, or even mostly, the fruit of his own 

 immediate and independent observation. Before him were the 

 Hippocratic and other schools of physicians and anatomists. Before 

 him there were nameless and forgotten Eabres, Roesels, Reaumurs, 

 and Hubers, who observed the habits, the diet, and the habitations 

 of the sand- wasp or the mason-bee : who traced out the little lives, 

 and discerned the vocal organs, of grasshopper and cicada ; and who, 

 together with generations of bee-keeping peasants, gathered up the 

 lore and wisdom of the bee. There were fishermen skilled in all the 

 cunning of their craft, who discussed the wanderings of tunny and 

 mackerel, 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 re-discovered 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 hecto- 

 cotylus arm that baffied Delia Chiaje, Cuvier, and Koelliker, and that 

 Verany and Heinrich Miiller re-explained. 



All this varied learning Aristotle gathered up and wove into his 

 great web. But every here and there, in words that are unmistakably 



