our studies naturally come to a focus in man. The history, the 
welfare and the destiny of man are questions which interest 
all civilized people. 
Biology or the natural history of living things deals with the 
phenomena of organic nature, and to man, its central figure it 
constantly returns. Morphology, the study of structure, 
physiology the study of function, pathology the study of dis- 
ease, and medicine the study of treatment go hand in hand, and 
are mutually dependent. We sometimes hear well meaning 
though misinformed persons speak of naturalists who spend 
laborious years of travel and devote their lives to research 
as if they were bitten with the mania of discovering new 
species. This is, of course, a great mistake. The history of 
every science begins with the naming of things, but this day 
is long past, and as Agassiz said in one of his cabin lectures 
when on his way to Brazil in 1865 : " This is now almost the 
lowest kind of scientific work." .... "The work of the nat- 
uralist, in our day, is to explore worlds the existence of which 
is already known; to investigate not to discover." . . . ."The 
discovery of a new species as such, does not change a feature 
in the science of natural history, any more than the discovery 
of a new asteriod changes the character of the problems to be 
investigated by astronomers. It is merely adding to the 
enumeration of objects. We should rather look for the funda- 
mental relations among animals; the number of species we 
may find is of importance only so far as they explain the dis- 
tribution and limitation of different genera and families, their 
relations to each other and to the world under which they live. 
Out of such investigations there looms up a deeper question for 
scientific men, the solution of which is to be the most important 
result of their work in coming generations. The origin of 
life is the great question of the day. How did the organic 
world come to be as it is ?" 
A generation has passed since these words were uttered, yet 
how true they still read ! Much indeed has been accomplished 
in this period ; the horizon of all science has widened. The 
germ theory of infectious disease has become a science and is 
