Notes and Comment 



269 



own requirements as to temperature and other environmental 

 factors, its own habits as to rate of growth, its own histological 

 characters, and capacity of adjustment The accumulation 

 and interpretation of data thus easily accessible affords unlimited 

 scope for the exercise of the best qualities of a well-trained 

 scientific mind. 



Teachers in the schools and colleges of the country might 

 advantageously read and ponder the following words of Rufus 

 W Weeks in the A rena: It is well known that a scientific man 

 in looking abroad upon the world sees it from the point of view 

 of his own science, whichever of the sciences that may be. For ex- 

 ample, if he is a mathematician, the whole complicated scheme 

 of things presents itself to him as an affair of numbers, dimen- 

 sions, quantities; if he is a minister, steeped in the lore of sin and 

 holiness, all the facts of the universe group themselves around 

 notions of right and wrongj if he is a physicist all resolves itself 

 into atoms and the groupings and movements of atoms. None 

 of these views appears to me at all comprehensive; and those 

 scholars appear to me to be nearer right who say that the point 

 of view of biology is really central; that life lies at the middle 

 point of things. For the biologist, after learning all he can learn 

 about living things, can feel his way back into the sciences of 

 physics, learning of the atoms and of how their groupings and 

 their laws made the necessary preparation for life; and, on the 

 other hand, his science of biology leads him up to man, the 

 highest of living creatures, and so to all the phenomena of mind 

 and soul, and to all the thoughts of justice and of goodness and 

 of their opposites. And so I propose that, for the moment, at 

 least, we take Life as the central fact of the Universe 



An article by Steinbrinck in a late number of the Berichte 

 der Deutschen Botanischen Gesellschajt merits notice, not so much 

 as a contribution to science as because it represents a form of 



