Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/32

 20 mathematicians, astronomers, and physicists say the same for these great departments of science. Every chemist, anatomist, and physiologist must be acquainted with French thought on these subjects. It was Lamarck who really broke the way to the new biology and gave it its name. Political economy, with all its merits and defects, orignated with the physiocrats. In the very word altruism Comte laid the foundation of a scientific ethics. And for moral power in fiction what author has approached Victor Hugo? The French mind penetrates to the very heart of every problem it attacks and is not deterred by practical obstacles. It has thus been the great organizer of human thought, leaving the details and frictional hindrances to the German and English schools. France has furnished the warp of science and philosophy, other nations their woof.

What has been said of astronomy and the sciences that fall within its far-reaching scope is also true of the other great groups. It is not necessary to give illustrations in all, but biology furnishes some that are specially instructive. Biology is the science of life and as such includes all that has life. Its principal branches are therefore vegetal and animal life. Yet biology is neither botany nor zoölogy, nor both combined. These, it is true, fall under it, but only in the same sense that geology and geography fall under astronomy. And just as the great bulk of geology and geography are not astronomy at all, so the greater part of both botany and zoölogy is not biology at all. This principle holds of all truly logical classification. The lower terms of any system of generalization always contain much more than the next higher. They stand under them, but all that belongs properly to them as lower terms does not belong to the higher terms but is additional to what is necessary to characterize them. This is well illustrated in both botany and zoölogy as systematic sciences. All classification here as elsewhere is what is called synoptical. In arranging the species of a great natural order they are always divided into first large and then progressively smaller and smaller groups. The order is divided into coordinate families, each family into coördinate genera, and each genus into