Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/180

176 that strict chemical knowledge can reach. Oceanography as now understood is quite impossible without chemistry, but it by no means follows that chemistry is the whole of oceanography. Physics is as essential as chemistry; and geology and astronomy are in turn as essential as physics.

So with the other inorganic sciences. Spectroscopy, a department of chemistry, has been largely the making of modern stellar astronomy. Yet is not such a problem as that of the variable stars, something over and above spectroscopy? Is it conceivable that spectroscopy alone would ever have discovered variable stars, and formulated the many interesting questions about them that astronomy is now asking?

Do not the same principles of constitution, and study of constitution, hold when we enter the domain of living objects? They surely do. Organisms have their own special qualities and so present their own problems, exactly as do oceans and stars. Biology depends upon, but at the same time transcends, chemistry and physics, in exactly the same way that astronomy rests upon but transcends chemistry and physics. We are here on the threshold of one of the oldest, in many of its aspects one of the most familiar scientific and philosophic puzzles; namely, that of the relation of a whole to the elements which compose it.

Alas for the proneness of humankind to go all awry with itself and nature from not duly heeding the commonest, most familiar things! Hear this dialogue that comes to us across a stretch of two thousand years:

Socrates—" Suppose one were to ask you a question about the first syllable in the name Socrates, and say 'Theætetus, tell me what SO is,' what would you answer?"

Theætetus—" That it is S and O."

S.—"Well, have you not there the reasoned statement of the syllable?"

T.—" Yes, certainly."

S.—" Proceed then and give me in the same way the reasoned statement of S."

T.—"But how can one give the elements of an element? For indeed, Socrates, S is one of the voiceless letters, a mere sound, as it were a whistling of the tongue. . . ."

S.—" But stay, I wonder if we are right in laying it down that while the element is not knowable the combination is?. . ."

T.—" That would be strange beyond all reason, Socrates. . . ."

S.—" Perhaps we ought to have taken the combination to be not the sum of the elements, but a single form resulting from them, with an individual shape of its own, and differing from the elements."

T.—" Certainly, very possibly this view is more correct than the other. . . ."

S.—" Then let the combination be, as we now put it, a single form, alike in letters and in everything else, resulting from the conjunction of harmonious elements in each case."