al life through ages. And even if our attempts to decipher a few
pages here and there in the volumes of this vast biological history
are not as successful as we could hope, we must not allow ourselves
to be discouraged from future efforts. Even if our translation is
here and there at fault, we must never forget the existence of the
history. Some of the worst errors of biologists are due to their
having forgotten that in the lower stages the germs of the higher
must be present, even though invisible to any microscope. Our study
of the worm is inadequate and likely to mislead us, unless we
remember that a worm was the ancestor of man. And a biologist who
can tell us nothing about man is neglecting his fairest field.

Conversely history and social science will rest on a firmer basis
when their students recognize that many human laws and institutions
are heirlooms, the attainments, or direct results of attainments, of
animals far below man. We are just beginning to recognize that the
study of zooelogy is an essential prerequisite to, and firm
foundation for, that of history, social science, philosophy, and
theology, just as really as for medicine. An adequate knowledge of
any history demands more than the study of its last page. The
zooelogist has been remiss in not claiming his birthright, and in
this respect has sadly failed to follow the path pointed out by Mr.
Darwin.

For palaeontology, zooelogy, history, social and political science,
and philosophy are really only parts of one great science, of
biology in the widest sense, in distinction from the narrower sense
in which it is now used to include zooelogy and botany. They form an
organic unity in which no one part can be adequately understood
without reference to the others. You know nothing of even a
constellation, if you have studied only one of its stars. Much less
can the study of a single organ or function give an adequate idea of
the human body.

Only when we have attained a biological history can we have any
satisfactory conception of environment. As we look about us in the
world, environment often seems to us to be a chaos of forces aiding
or destroying good and bad, fit and unfit, alike.

But our history of animal and human progress shows us successive
stages, each a little higher than the preceding, and surviving, for
a time at least, because more completely conformed to environment.
If this be true, and it must be true unless our theory of evolution
be