176 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



that strict chemical knowledge can reach. Oceanography as now 

 understood is quite impossible without chemistry, but it by no means 

 follows that chemistry is the whole of oceanography. Physics is as 

 essential as chemistry; and geology and astronomy are in turn as 

 essential as physics. 



So with the other inorganic sciences. Spectroscopy, a department 

 of chemistry, has been largely the making of modern stellar astronomy. 

 Yet is not such a problem as that of the variable stars, something over 

 and above spectroscopy? Is it conceivable that spectroscopy alone 

 would ever have discovered variable stars, and formulated the many 

 interesting questions about them that astronomy is now asking? 



Do not the same principles of constitution, and study of constitu- 

 tion, hold when we enter the domain of living objects? They surely 

 do. Organisms have their own special qualities and so present their 

 own problems, exactly as do oceans and stars. Biology depends upon, 

 but at the same time transcends, chemistry and physics, in exactly the 

 same way that astronomy rests upon but transcends chemistry and 

 physics. We are here on the threshold of one of the oldest, in many 

 of its aspects one of the most familiar scientific and philosophic puz- 

 zles; namely, that of the relation of a whole to the elements which 

 compose it. 



Alas for the proneness of humankind to go all awry with itself and 

 nature from not duly heeding the commonest, most familiar things ! 

 Hear this dialogue that comes to us across a stretch of two thousand 

 years : 



Socrates — " Suppose one were to ask you a question about the first syllable 

 in the name Socrates, and say ' Theaetetus, tell me what SO is,' what would 

 you answer ? " 



Thecetetus—" That it is S and 0." 



8. — " Well, have you not there the reasoned statement of the syllable ? " 



T — "Yes, certainly." 



8. — " Proceed then and give me in the same way the reasoned statement 

 of S." 



T. — " But how can one give the elements of an element ? For indeed, 

 Socrates, S is one of the, voiceless letters, a mere sound, as,. it were a whistling 

 of the tongue. . . ." 



8. — " But stay, I wonder if we are right in laying it down that while the 

 element is not knowable the combination is? . . ." 



T. — " That would be strange beyond all reason, Socrates. . . ." 



8. — " Perhaps we ought to have taken the combination to be not the sum 

 of the elements, but a single form resulting from them, with an individual shape 

 of its own, and differing from the elements." 



T. — " Certainly, very possibly this view is more correct than the other. . . ." 



8.—" Then let the combination be, as we now put it, a single form, alike in 

 letters and in everything else, resulting from the conjunction of harmonious 

 elements in each case." 3 



3 "The Theaetetus and Philebus of Plato," translated by H. F. Carlill, in 

 " New Classical Libary." 



