Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/410

406, who see their own cubist diagrams, instead of living, growing things; the cytologists, breeders and experimentalists, with their thumbnail sketches of the minute machinery of life, and of heredity; with their now widely familiar Mendelism, chromosomes, tropisms, artificial parthenogenesis and eugenics.

The precise methods of the modern biologist may give us commendably accurate pictures of some particular point, or phase, of life, as life is at the present moment. They have, no doubt, greatly stimulated and enriched the science of biology; but they have not clarified it, nor unified it to a corresponding degree, because they have not given us large pictures of the processes and products of evolution; and because their formulas, when widely applied, are contradictory and often meaningless. They lack perspective, and for that reason they have not taken, nor can they take, the place of the descriptive and historic sciences, such as geology, paleontology and comparative anatomy. They alone can show us approximately what life was like in the remote past, the wonderful progress it has made, its method of making progress, and the order of its accomplishment.

Thus the multiplicity, and the changing intensity, of the images formed by the compound eye of modern science have created much confusion in the mind of the scientist and the layman; one that is augmented by a prevalent opinion that certain points of view, and certain methods of studying nature, are more "scientific," more truthful and more trustworthy than others.

It is clear that the microscopic, telescopic and panoramic methods of studying nature have their respective virtues and the defects of their qualities, for each method, and each point of view, shows important things the other fails to reveal. In their attempts to portray nature, biologists often forget the weakness of the one and fail to utilize the strength of the other. By thus limiting their field of vision; by exaggerating the minute, the local, the dramatic, and the tragic incidents of life, they overlook the most significant teachings of nature, although they are familiarly and universally proclaimed by her. The layman is always a loser thereby, for while the sicklied germs of truth fly far and wide on the white wings of explanatory lies, the mature plant is too deep rooted and ponderous to be successfully transplanted.

The picture of nature painted by the field naturalists was a warring, hostile nature, "red in tooth and claw with ravine." Its merciless struggle for existence, its wanton destruction and tragic incident, as portrayed by their disciples, deeply moved both scientist and layman, and greatly influenced the conduct and the interpretation of human life.

But the attention of the naturalists was mainly focused on the fifth