186 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. (Vor. XXXIII. 
scientist is pictured as an inquiring Gradgrind, who seeks for 
facts, facts, and nothing but facts; he weighs, he measures, 
and he describes; and weighing, measuring, and describing con- 
stitute science. No! Thecollection of facts, no matter how 
accurately accomplished, is no more science than the alphabet 
is literature. As Huxley has well put it, “the mere accumula- 
tion of facts without generalization and classification is as great 
an error intellectually as, hygienically, would be the attempt to 
strengthen by accumulating nourishment without due attention 
to the primal vie, the result in each case being chiefly giddi- 
ness and confusion in the head.” Observation alone is not 
science; facts without deduction are merely the clay without 
the straw. Observations, accurate and extensive, are a primal 
necessity, but observation alone merely furnishes the crude 
material from which, by reflection and deduction, scientific 
facts may be obtained. 
So then, what is usually regarded as the whole of anatomy — 
descriptive anatomy — is not necessarily a science; it consti- 
tutes merely an aggregate of facts upon which deduction may 
act, and it is the sum-total of the observations and deductions 
that constitutes the science. 
The purpose of this address is to consider chiefly the general 
standpoint of anatomy as it is at present, but a few words seem 
necessary concerning the more observational side. The facts 
or observations at the disposal of the anatomist of to-day are 
enormously more numerous and detailed than those available 
at, let us say, the beginning of the present century; and this 
progress along the material side has been largely due to the 
greater facilities for observation which we now possess. The 
anatomists of the sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth 
century possessed only such information as was afforded by the 
use of the scalpel and their unaided vision. In the seventeenth 
century a new tool was placed in their hands, the microscope, 
without which the anatomist of to-day is well-nigh helpless. 
At once new fields for observation were revealed and many 
new facts were secured, though for many years the microscope 
was rather a plaything than a tool. Indeed, it was not until 
the present century was well advanced that the optical imper- 
