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Whilst instinct vibrates in sympathetic harmony with life, it is about inert matter that intelligence is granted; it is a rider to our faculty of action; it triumphs in geometry; it feels at home among the objects in which our industry finds its supports and its tools. In a word, "our logic is primarily the logic of solids." It is very important that deduction should be so impotent in biology.
"At first sight," the director said to him, when explaining the problem, "it does not seem as though the biology of a sea-snail were a matter of much importance to the country, but as a matter of fact, to a great extent the oyster industry which reaches millions of dollars annually and gives employment as well as food to thousands of people depends upon that very thing." "Just how, Mr.
He then illustrates, in interesting detail, the varied applications of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and social science to the industries and economies of real life, and concludes as follows: "That which our school courses leave almost entirely out, we thus find to be that which most nearly concerns the business of life.
So when wonderful phenomena in the nervous system are observed, when tables are smashed by invisible hands, when people see ghosts through stone walls, and know what is passing in the heart of Africa, how easily you unlock your wardrobe of terms and clap on the back of every eccentric fact your ready-made phrase-coat, Animal Magnetism, Biology, Odic Force, Optical Illusion, Second Sight, Spirits, and what not!
In certain extreme cases we call it 'mimicry', and invoke hypotheses to account for this 'mimetic' resemblance; and those of us who reject these hypotheses must fain take refuge in others, as far-reaching in their way. This at least we know, that Speusippus seized upon a real problem of biology, of lasting interest and even of fundamental importance.
By the simultaneous advances of geology and biology man's perspective in time was revolutionised, just as the Copernican astronomy had revolutionised his perspective in space.
So far as biology is concerned, the publication of the 'Origin of Species, for the first time, put the doctrine of evolution, in its application to living things, upon a sound scientific foundation. It became an instrument of investigation, and in no hands did it prove more brilliantly profitable than in those of Darwin himself.
That narrow negative expression has been more and more subordinated to the transformation of energy, in which the qualitative content of the process is duly recognised and the last notion of an extramundane Creator is destroyed. And since biology has been treated in the light of the theory of evolution it has abolished one stiff line of classification after another in the realm of organic nature.
The tree grows and lives by taking in the carbonic acid from the air, and solidifying its carbon; the animal grows and lives by taking the solidified carbon from the plant, and converting it once more into carbonic acid. That, in its ideally simple form, is the Iliad in a nutshell, the core and kernel of biology. The whole cycle of life is one eternal see-saw.
It is well, indeed, that this is so, for if gravitation and the laws of inertia were not consistent and reliable principles holding true at all times and not intermittently, it would be difficult to order our lives with confidence. In the next place, the general principles of biology hold true for the structure and physiology of the human species as they do for all other living things.
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