Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/361

Rh all life develops from centers; and in Nature there are no single lines.

5. Miss Youmans's final proposition, that progress must always be made from the simple to the complex, is the one with which I do most decidedly disagree. The expression itself is ambiguous: for it may mean the transition from the easy to the difficult; or it may mean the study of elements as a preliminary to the study of the compounds into which they enter. In the latter meaning, the proposition can not surely be applied to the leaf and the flower. Morphologically speaking, it is true that all the parts of the flower result from transformations of the leaf, but this fact is altogether too recondite for a child's appreciation. In no other sense can the leaf be said to enter into the flower as an element—to be a "simpler" part of it. No knowledge to be gained of the flower, other than these facts of embryology, presupposes or requires knowledge of the leaf. Study of the one can only be said to prepare for the other by the degree of menial discipline it affords. And the very question at issue is, What is the best for mental discipline, the contemplation of objects with the fewer and less obvious characters, or of objects at once more conspicuous, and more abounding in interesting details? I have already stated the reasons which seem to me to justify the selection of the second method.

The first seems indorsed, and perhaps is intended to be so, by the Comtist classification of the sciences, and by the rather arbitrary attempt of its author to identify this with the actual order of their historic evolution. As regards their subject-matter, it would certainly be untrue to assert that this attracted the attention of mankind in the order of its (philosophically considered) simplicity. At what appear to us to be the opening periods of Greek thought we find already coexisting the germs of all the six fundamental sciences, if we may assume that even chemistry was foreshadowed in the doctrines of the Four Elements. Such coexistence was inevitable, for the moment that the human mind was aroused enough to observe and theorize about anything, its attention could not fail to be attracted in several different directions simultaneously. It noticed the form and number of objects, and founded the sciences of geometry and arithmetic. But it was quite unaware that these sciences deal with simpler elements than make up human organisms, and believed that physiology and medicine