642 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXI. Xo. 539. 



in experience is there truth.' And 

 Haeekel, in his persistent advocacy of the 

 great monistic system, based upon the 

 unity of nature and the unity of science, 

 has asserted, 'All natural science is philos- 

 ophy, and all true philosophy is natural 

 science. All true science is natural philos- 

 ophy. ' 



The great pile at a distance presents it- 

 self to the mental perspective in barest 

 outline. As the imaginer draws nigh, the 

 multitudinous variety of the structure is 

 limned on the intellectual horizon. The 

 enormity of the edifice is overmastering. 

 "The larger grows the sphere of knowl- 

 edge, the greater becomes its area of con- 

 tact Avith the unknown." Various crafts 

 must needs arise to disentangle its intri- 

 cacies. 



Numerous subdivisions of natural sci- 

 ence have resulted. Each gives more and 

 more to its specialty. At times, in the close 

 scrutiny, the investigator is so near that 

 he fails to grasp the whole and see their 

 relationship. It is unfortunately a fact, 

 as Pearson says, that 'no man whose nose 

 is always on the details of observation is 

 a safe fact-gatherer, while no one whose 

 head is too high above such necessary 

 drudgery is a safe generalizer. ' 



The complexity of nature seems bound- 

 less. "Boundless inward in the atom; 

 boundless outward in the whole." 



Biology is the science of life. Elsewhere 

 I have asserted that biology is the applica- 

 tion of physics and chemistry to living 

 matter. It requires little knowledge to 

 show that these divisions of science are 

 purely arbitrary. After all, they are not 

 so much divisions or parts of science, as 

 they are simply different methods of look- 

 ing at the same mystery. While Laplace 

 in his mechanical conception of the world 

 asserted that the progress of nature could 

 be foretold for all eternity if the masses, 

 their position and initial velocities were 



given, Mach has well said, "Physical .sci- 

 ence does not pretend to be a complete 

 view of the world; it simply claims that 

 it is working towards such a complete view 

 in the future. The highest philosophy of 

 the scientific investigator is precisely this 

 toleration of an incomplete conception of 

 the world and the preference for it rather 

 than for an apparently perfect but inade- 

 quate conception." It is not, therefore, 

 gross temerity which prompts the chemist 

 to give thought to the relations of life and 

 chemistry, for life is chemistry, chemistry 

 applied. It may border on rashness, how- 

 ever, to give utterance to those thoughts, 

 as masters have lost themselves in such con- 

 templations. 



Chemistry has taught man to know aright the 

 requirements of mother earth, the conditions 

 which must be fulfilled to ensure bountiful crops. 

 No longer need virgins be sacrificed to the genius 

 of maize, as was done by some tribes of American 

 Indians, in order to plead for a generous yield of 

 the life-sustaining cereal. (Wiechmann.) 



While science appeals to us from a most 

 practical point of view and especially is 

 that true for chemistry, it is not to that 

 phase of the subject that I desire to direct 

 your attention. 



Before Darwin there was more anticipa- 

 tion, but some interpretation, of nature. 

 Although preceded by Heraclitus and 

 Empedoeles, Aristotle appears to have laid 

 the foundations of biology. For fifteen 

 centuries, with limited exceptions, they 

 were unbuilt upon. Then there began the 

 gradual growth of the scientific renascence, 

 culminating in the Encyclopsedists. Sci- 

 ence, however, does 'not consist solely in 

 the description of observed facts.' 



Biological history for our purposes may 

 be schematized as follows : organism, or- 

 gan, tissue, cell protoplasm. Altmann's 

 visible grannies, Fleniming's threads, 

 Frommann's skeleton, Biitschli's honey- 

 comb, according to Haeekel, are but see- 



