Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/691

Rh much on the subject as is contained in the work of Linnæus, which was then the standard authority. Now, how has that been brought about? If you consider what zoölogy, or the study of animals, signifies, you will see that it means an endeavor to ascertain all that can be studied, all the answers that can be given respecting any animal under four possible points of view. The first of these embraces considerations of structure. An animal has a certain structure, a certain mode of development, which means a series of stages in that structure. In the second place, every animal exhibits a great number of active powers, the knowledge of which constitutes its physiology; and under those active powers we have, as physiologists, not only to include such matters as have been referred to by Dr. McDonnell in his observations, but to take into account other kinds of activity. I see it announced that the Zoölogical Section of to-day is to have a highly-interesting paper by Sir John Lubbock on the habits of ants. Ants have a polity, and exhibit a certain amount of intelligence, and all these matters are proper subjects for the study of the zoölogist as far as he deals with the ant.

There is yet a third point of view in which you may regard every animal. It has a distribution. Not only is it to be found somewhere on the earth's surface, but paleontology tells us, if we go back in time, that the great majority of animals have had a past history—that they occurred in epochs of the world's history far removed from the present. And, when we have acquired all that knowledge which we may enumerate under the heads of anatomy, physiology, and distribution, there remains still the problem of problems to the zoölogist, which is the study of the causes of those phenomena, in order that we may know how those things came about. All these different forms of knowledge and inquiry are legitimate subjects for science, there being no subject which is an illegitimate subject for scientific inquiry, except such as involves a contradiction in terms, or is itself absurd. Indeed, I don't know that I ought to go quite so far as this at present, for, undoubtedly, there are many benighted persons who have been in the habit of calling by no less bard names conceptions which our president tells us must be regarded with much respect. If we have four dimensions of space we may have forty dimensions, and that would be a long way beyond that which is conceivable by ordinary powers of imagination. I should, therefore, not like to draw too closely the limits as to what may be contradiction to the best-established principles. Now, let us turn to a proposition which no one can possibly deny—namely, that there is a distinct sense in which man is an animal. There is not the smallest doubt of that proposition. If anybody entertains a misgiving on that point, he has simply to walk through the museum close by in order to see that man has a structure and a framework which may be compared, point for point and bone for bone, with those of the lower animals. There is not the smallest doubt, moreover, that, as to the manner of his becoming, man is developed, step by step, in exactly the same way as they are. There