Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/236

232 now its small resources are being devoted to certain aspects of the mode of life of organisms in nature; to the nature and relationships of natural races; and to the influence of natural environments upon organisms, particularly as to the heritability of such influences. No other subjects are, in the belief of the management, of greater moment to present-day biology, and various circumstances make their study by the institution peculiarly practicable. But the managing board have no delusions as to the uniquely "burning" character of the questions under investigation, or as to its having reached the threshold of the Ultimate Mystery of Life and Death. Its profound belief in the importance of biologic truth to the welfare of humankind is of such sort that it knows that many other problems being studied by many other men and other institutions are no less vital than those engaging its efforts*; and that problems of to-morrow, next year, next decade, next century, while different from those of to-day, will be no less numerous and no less insistent than those of to-day. It holds every item of positive knowledge of the living world essential to the scientific interpretation of that world; that such interpretation alone can beget a right attitude toward that world; and that the high level of man's development which we call civilization is wholly dependent upon a right attitude on the part of the largest number possible of the community toward all things that live.