Page:Insects - Their Ways and Means of Living.djvu/28

PREFACE Then there arose still another group of inquiring minds. Members of this school could not see anything worth while in knowing merely either what an animal did or how it was made. They devoted their efforts to discovering the secrets of its workings. They invented instruments for measuring the power of its muscles, for testing the nature of the force that resides in its nerves; they made analyses of its food and its tissues; they devised all kinds of experiments for revealing the causes of its behavior. The workers in this branch, the physiologists, had to have a considerable grounding in physics and chemistry; consequently they came to write more or less in the languages of those sciences and to express themselves in chemical and mathematical formulae. Their writings are hard for the public to understand. Their statements, moreover, are often at odds with preconceived ideas, since preconceived ideas are conceived in ignorance, and the public at large does not take to this sort of thing—it cherishes above all its inherited opinions.

Therefore the old-time naturalist is still venerated, as he deserves to be, and those who call themselves "nature lovers" still like to decry the laboratory worker as an evil being who would take the beauty from nature and destroy the soul of man. A modern writer of the old school may sell his wares, but when something goes wrong with his stomach or his nerves, or when his plants or his animals are attacked by disease, it is the knowledge of the laboratory scientist that comes to his aid.

The reason that the specific truths of nature must be found out in laboratories is that there are too many things mixed together in the fields. The laboratory naturalist endeavors to untangle the confusion of elements in the outdoor environment and to isolate the different factors that affect the life and behavior of an animal, in order that he may be sure with just what he is dealing in his efforts to determine the value of each one separately. By creating a set of artificial environments in each of which [ii]