Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/125

Rh and the experimental psychologist are already largely physical, and their researches are carried on in laboratories. In proportion as the various circumstances are rendered more amenable to external control, so the methods of biology will more nearly approach those of physics. Whereas biology was until recently chiefly a science of observation, it has now become in a high degree experimental. The physiologist removes or alters organs, removes eggs from the natural parent and places them in a foster-mother, cuts off the heads and tails of worms and observes the conditions of survival and regeneration. If the force of gravity were removed, in what direction would a plant grow? If an egg be subjected to centrifugal force in which direction will the head of the animal appear? These are the sort of questions that the biologist is now attacking. Nor is he without mathematical statements. The great generalization of Darwin of fifty years ago has ever since concentrated attention on problems of development and heredity. Darwin's conclusions were the results of the observations of a long life. Now the experimental method enables one to hasten and accelerate conclusions. The gentle monk and acute man of science, Gregor Mendel, forty years ago in his cloister at Brünn by his careful experiments on the crossing of thousands of peas, and by comparisons of their seeds, flowers and stems, succeeded in unveiling a law which has profoundly influenced ideas on heredity, not only in plants but in animals. He finds that in the process of hybridization there are certain characteristics which are transmitted entire to the offspring, and are termed dominant, others which seem to disappear or become latent in the process, which he terms recessive. When however the hybrids are bred together both qualities reappear in the offspring, and in a definite proportion of three of the dominant to one of the recessive. In the next generation another definite proportion occurs, and so on. We here have a very definite arithmetical relation, which is susceptible of very exact study and confirmation.

The method of Mendel, which we may call that of experimental evolution, is now of wide application, and there are laboratories which do nothing else but breed and cross under very exact control. Among one of the large-scale experimenters in this line may be mentioned Mr. Luther Burbank, who, though a master of method and subsidized by the Carnegie Institution, seems to be devoted rather to practical than to scientific results.

In connection with the laboratory or experimental method in evolution, must be mentioned a most promising application of mathematics to biology in the new science of biometrics, or the application of the methods of probability or statistics to great numbers of similar objects. If the doctrines of evolution or of variation are ever to be accurately proved it must be in this manner. To illustrate, suppose we have a