Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/354

350 to the students in our colleges and universities an idea of the results of the activity of the nature seekers. Its sister science, botany, which runs parallel to it, deals with similar phenomena in plants. Still, it is only among animals that we find nervous responses tolerably well developed. The presence of a nervous system in animals in connection with a highly developed state of other organs affords a more comprehensive picture of vital activity. If I seem, in this statement, to show bias, it should be set down to the circumstance that my activities for some years have been taken up mainly with the study of animal life.

The observations in zoology, as carried on to-day, are so illuminating and have such important bearings that we can see why it is that all over the civilized world it has been given such a prominent place in universities and colleges. We begin to understand why great buildings are constructed for its laboratories, and why a number of men in one faculty represent different phases of zoological investigation. This is why in the State University of Iowa, as in other similar institutions, zoology has come to occupy a prominent and an honored place in the curriculum of studies.

It is the ideas of this science woven into the fabric of human thought which I have in mind, rather than merely its details. Disjointed fragments of knowledge are of little worth; they must be combined into a unity before they have much meaning. Isolated facts should be treated as merely specific illustrations of broad truths. The study of one stone in an edifice as to its chemical analysis, its resistance to strain and crushing weight, and its microscopic structure, will not give us an idea of the edifice as a whole. Thus it is that after our students have observed and experimented in the laboratory they must, under the guidance of the lecturer, be brought to see the relation of their specific observations to zoology as a science.

It is owing largely to advances in zoology that we are enabled to formulate theories about the world, the history of living beings on it, and the part they play in the scheme of nature. It is owing to the intellectual progress that zoology has chiefly promoted that we have been able to comprehend the structure of the human body and thereby to discern the means of promoting its well being and assisting in its care. It is owing chiefly to the advances supplied by the study of zoology that one can adequately appreciate the soliloquy that Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Hamlet: "What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!"

His structure and his development excite in the mind of the anatomist the same measure of admiration and wonder. And we observe in passing that the most discerning anatomists are the comparative anatomists of zoology.