Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/277

Rh specially interest ordinary humanity, are apart, and that the conclusions reached in the one have no direct effect in the other. If you acquaint yourself with the history of philosophy, and with the endless variations of human opinion therein recorded, you will find that there is not a single one of those speculative difficulties which at the present time torment many minds as being the direct product of scientific thought, which is not as old as the times of Greek philosophy, and which did not then exist as strongly and as clearly as such difficulties exist now, though they arose out of arguments based upon merely philosophical ideas. Whoever admits these two things—as everybody who looks about him must do—whoever takes into account the existence of evil in this world and the law of causation—has before him all the difficulties that can be raised by any form of scientific speculation. And these two difficulties have been occupying the minds of men ever since man began to think. The other consideration I have to put before you is that, whatever may be the results at which physical science, as applied to man shall arrive, those results are inevitable— I mean that they arise out of the necessary progress of scientific thought as applied to man. You all, I hope, had the opportunity of hearing the excellent address which was given by our president yesterday, in which he traced out the marvellous progress of our knowledge of the higher animals which has been effected since the time of Linnaeus. It is no exaggeration to say that at this present time the merest tyro knows a thousand times as much on the subject as is contained in the work of Linnaeus, which was then the standard authority. Now how has that been brought about? If you consider what zoology, 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 and a certain mode of development, which means that it passes through a series of stages to 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 zoological section of to-day is to have a highly interesting paper by Sir John Lubbock on the habits of ants. Ants have a policy, and exhibit a certain amount of intelligence, and all these matters are proper subjects for the study of the zoologist 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