United States or Kenya ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And if the great biologist finds himself in the company of Topsy, he will not mind. Perhaps, indeed, as he is said to enjoy a joke and to be able to crack one, might he jocularly observe to "tremendous personages" like the Bishop of Carlisle, that this is not the first instance of truths being hidden from the "wise" and revealed unto babes.
If the general spread of biological knowledge serves merely to expose that foolish assumption there would be progress to record. Dr Blakeslee , a well-known American biologist, lately gave a good illustration of this. In a paper on education he showed photographs of two varieties of maize. The ripe fruits of both are colourless if their sheaths be unbroken.
In reality, these two senses of the word "correlation" are often interchanged in the mind of the biologist, just like the two senses of the word "adaptation." And the confusion is almost legitimate in botany, that science in which the theory of the formation of species by sudden variation rests on the firmest experimental basis.
His list of heroes and benefactors of mankind includes, not only every important name in the scientific movement, from Thales of Miletus to Fourier the mathematician and Blainville the biologist, and in the aesthetic from Homer to Manzoni, but the most illustrious names in the annals of the various religions and philosophies, and the really great politicians in all states of society.
Suddenly he wished that Wonstead had not killed it, though he supposed that Chou, their biologist, would be grateful. But the animal looked particularly defenseless. It would have been better not to mark their first day on this new world with a killing even if it were the knocking over of a stupid rabbit thing. The pilot was glad when Chou bore it off and he no longer had to look at it.
A biologist has said: "The history of development in different animals. . . offers to us. . . a series of ingenious, determined, varied but more or less unsuccessful efforts to escape from the necessity of recapitulating, and to substitute for the ancestral method a more direct method."
But the biologist, by studying a human embryo of a few days' or a few weeks' growth, can not tell whether it will be male or female, and still less whether it will be a strong or a weak individual, phlegmatic or nervous, intelligent or not.
One of the most interesting discoveries of recent date in regard to the processes which go on in that all-important material protoplasm which is the physical basis of life and the essential constituent of "cells" those minute corpuscles of which all living bodies are built was made in 1910 by a French naturalist, M. Bataillon, and has been examined and confirmed by another French biologist, M. Henneguy.
"I cannot see that biology has moral value." But it may have moral influence just as literature and history and biography may have. Of course, pure biology alone will not make people more sexually moral, but no responsible biologist has ever claimed that it will.
And I have a right in such a matter to accept the witness of the experts. A saint is an expert in spiritual things, and his evidence in spiritual matters is as cogent and trustworthy as that of the biologist or geologist in his special field of experience.
Word Of The Day