Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/311

Rh nature in a static way, the record of experiments of nature herself, so long in trying, that we do not recognize her movement at all. Wherefore descriptive science seems less exhilarating than experimental science. It has less movement to it; for nature does not seem to move, and we need not as we watch her; yet static knowledge lies at the foundation of most discoveries in dynamic nature. We must know the plants and animals of any given region and know them exactly before we can study migrations and movements, the origin of faunas, the distribution of forms. The movements in geologic time are best traced by the shells which the rocks carry with them, and these shells admit of no experiment, have no apparent dynamic significance. Descriptive anatomy precedes physiology and interprets it; embryology interprets anatomy, but to a like degree anatomy interprets embryology. Ecology, the study of life histories, interprets all these and is explained by them. According to Lubbock, the knowledge of the habits of animals, their reaction to stimuli, external and internal, is the final end of zoological science.

It has been a fashion of the fin du siècle sort, a fad of the last end of the last century, for workers in other lines to look down on systematic zoology and systematic botany. They would know the general structure and relations of animals and plants in a great large way, but were infinitely bored by the details, and especially by those of the larger forms, those which can not be sliced and imbedded in Canada balsam. This feeling is unworthy of large-minded men. As I said just now, it is not good form in science for one set of workers to look down on another. The varied details of systematic science embody the fanaticism for veracity of the men who have worked them out. It is, after all, the man who does the minute work who advances science. Anybody can devise new groupings of large lines of facts. The man who found out the least true detail about the heart of the lancelet, even the man who found a new kind of lancelet in the sands of the Bahamas, contributed more to science than the men who gave new names to the class of lancelets in their new schemes of vertebrate classification. As if Leptocardii were not good enough, we have these little creatures called Acrania, Pharyngobranchii, Cephalochorda or Cirrostomi. We all know that the lancelet is headless, that it has gill slits around the throat, a nerve cord where its head ought to be, and cirri about its mouth, but we knew that when they were Leptocardii or merely lancelets, and these new names merely cumber the books without adding at all to our knowledge.

Linnæus once said, with the fine sarcasm of the ancients: 'Tyro novit classes, magister fit species.' Any beginner can define classes of plants. It takes a master to work out the species. Any beginner can see things in the large; all the world does that; but only the master can get down to details. He can shut his eyes to all outside, and can