all the bogs and a few lines of soundings have been run across the grass bogs adjacent to the present pond. These seem to show in the buried contours a row of roundish potholes on the north and a single much larger and somewhat deeper basin on the south. These are connected by a shallower, valley-like depression lying between. These are the two major divisions of the basin, as already indicated, differing in the nature of their catchment areas and water supply; differing strikingly in their plant and animal life, and in the consequent bottom deposits.

The round bogs were once doubtless open circular ponds. They are now completely overgrown. Bogs A, B and C are very similar, though the filling of C is a little more advanced. Each has a central area of dense low-growing sphagnum and heath, surrounded by two zones of larger woody plants. First is a narrow zone of shrubs, and second a wide zone of water loving trees-yellow birch, red maple, black ash, etc.-extending to the foot of the slope. The latter zone is now a cutover area, studded with stumps of trees only, among which the shrubbery of the first zone, tall ferns and other shade plants, brambles and other immigrants are all struggling lustily for place and standing room. A few scattering worthless trees remain, having escaped the axe.

The more shoal areas of the remainder of the basin, and all the principal areas of silt deposition, whether originally shallow or not, are covered with bush swamp, the dominant species in which is the speckled alder. This alder grows luxuriantly along the silt-strewn edges of all the brooks and about the borders of Mud Pond. Under its shadow in the wetter places grow acres of marsh marigold and skunk cabbage interspersed with swamp saxifrage, and in the plashy edges of the interrupted streamlets, the spreading Chrysosplenium. The alder grows in spreading clumps of usually 4 to 8 strong stems, which gather fallen twigs and leafage about their bases, and thus build up miniature islets in the swamp. On the summit of these such plants as meadowrue and marsh fern and bedstraw and red raspberry find lodgment. The older outer stems of the alder clumps, being loosely anchored in the mud, are borne down to the ground by the heavy ice-coats of winter, and new shoots from the center of the clump arise in their stead. Thus the holding unit is maintained. The alder is the most important plant in the later stages of land building in the basin.

The grass bogs are far less uniform in the character of their vegetation than are the round bogs. Their meadow-like appearance is due to the dominance in them of several species of tussock forming grasses and sedges. These species are of local and irregular distribution, and rarely occur in anything like a pure stand. Where the tussocks are highest-often knee height or higher, so that walking among them is

no easy matter-their height is increased by at least two animal agencies; the ants of the marsh build their nests in the top of the tussocks, and in so doing heap up much material on their summits; the meadow mice excavate runways in the bottom of the narrow channel between the tussocks and eat new shoots springing from severed stems, and thus they deepen the narrow lanes between the tussocks.

The grass bogs lack the heaths of the round bogs, but they contain areas having a considerable admixture of sphagnum with here and there an overgrowth of cranberries. There are marsh ferns also in plenty; and in a wet spot in the largest one, a bit of cattail has obtained a foothold. The edges of all the grass bogs are being invaded by alder.

The filling of the basin is well nigh completed. The work of the plants has been supplemented and accelerated in recent times by human interference. Only one small and shallow pond remains open water and that is rapidly filling up with silt. The grass bogs are merely the openings in the herbaceous bog-cover that are not yet overgrown by alder or other shrub. The largest of these are the two that lie in the southern part of the basin. They are situated on either side of the pond but separated from it and from each other by the shore-bordering alders. A line of probings through the surface peat extending across the middle of the largest grass bogs from north to south at 50 feet intervals gave depths as follows: 5-15-17-19-18-17-1817-17-3 feet of peat. The depth of the underlying marl was not determined. A single probing of the bed of the larger grass bog in the bush swamp above the surface of Argus Brook at its northeast corner revealed a depth of 18 feet of surface peat. It is altogether probable that a systematic sampling of the deposits of the whole of the whole basin, with careful examination and comparison of the samples, would reveal much of the actual history of the filling process.

The Preserve is being inclosed with a high fence, that will keep browsing farm animals outside. Stiles will be built over the fence at convenient points of access, and one principal encircling path through the woods about the borders of the basin will be kept open. Signs inviting naturalists to enter for study, but not for destruction, will be placed beside the stiles and another guide sign to motorists will be placed at the north side of the state road that runs between Cortland and Dryden a quarter of a mile to the southward. This Preserve is open to all naturalists and all are welcome to visit it.

S

HISTORY OF BIOLOGY*

By Dr. LORANDE LOSS WOODRUFF
PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY, YALE UNIVERSITY

OME practical acquaintance with plants and animals undoubtedly formed the chief content of the mental equipment of prehistoric man, and a considerable knowledge of agriculture and medicine was possessed by the Egyptians and Sumerians nearly 7,000 years ago. So biology has a very ancient pedigree. But biology as the science of life-the study of living phenomena for their own sake in which emphasis is shifted from the practical to the philosophical-really begins with the Greeks, and reaches per saltum a height which was not surpassed, indeed not again attained, for nearly twenty centuries.

Science reaching Greece from the South and East fell upon fertile soil, and in the hands of the Hellenic natural philosophers was organized into coherent systems through the realization that nature works by fixed laws a conception foreign to the Oriental mind and the cornerstone of all future work because it gave purpose to personal scientific investigation. This attitude of approach is largely responsible for the transformation of the Greek scientific heritage from a collectivistic to an eponymous product. It is not an exaggeration to say that to all intents and purposes the Greeks laid the foundations of the chief subdivision of natural science and, specifically, created biology, though the term biology was first used by Lamarck and Treviranus at the beginning of the nineteenth century.2

Aristotle, (384-322 B. C.) the most famous pupil of Plato and dissenter from the Platonic School, represents the highwater mark of the Greek students of nature and is justly called the Father of Natural History. Aristotle's contributions to biology are manifold. He took a broad survey of the existing facts and welded them into a science by relying, to a considerable extent, on the direct study of organisms and by insisting that the only true path of advance lay in accurate observation and description. But mere observation without interpretation is not science. Aristotle's generalizations his elaboration of broad philosophical conceptions of organisms give to his biological works their perennial significance. Among the facts and supposed facts, and

*Delivered at Yale University, April 29, 1920; the third lecture of a series on the History of Science, given under the auspices of Yale Chapter of the Gamma Alpha Graduate Scientific Fraternity.

1E. Clodd: Pioneers of Evolution, 2d ed., 1907, pp. 29-32. C. Singer: Studies in the History and Method of Science, 1917.

2Lamarck: Hydrogéologic, 1802. G. R. Treviranus: Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur für Naturforscher und Aerzte, 1802-22.

of course there are innumerable crudities if for no other reason than that adequate apparatus and biological technique were of the distant future, there are interspersed questions, answers, theories which show a recognition and remarkable grasp of fundamental biological problems. A study of Aristotle's works shows ancient pedigrees for some of the most "modern" questions of biology, though it is undoubtedly true, as Sachs insists, that one must continually inhibit the tendency to read the present viewpoint into the past, and not assign to earlier writers merits which, if they were alive, they themselves would not claim.

We have not mentioned a single discovery made by Aristotle-and with purpose. Aristotle's position as the founder of biology rests chiefly on his viewpoint and his methods. Plato relied on intuition as the basis of knowledge. Aristotle emphasized observation and induction, insisting that errors arise not from the false testimony of our sense organs but from false interpretations of the data they afford. "We must not accept a general principle from logic only, but must prove its application to each fact; for it is in facts that we must seek general principles, and these must always accord with facts from which induction is the pathway to general laws."3 But it is not to be imagined that Aristotle always followed his own advice; few great men do "no pilot can explore unsurveyed channels without a confidence which sometimes leads to disaster." It must be admitted that Aristotle frequently lapsed into unbridled speculation which tended to obscure the methods that time has shown produce the most enduring results, though, as Huxley has well said, "It is a favorite popular delusion that the scientific enquirer is under a sort of moral obligation to abstain from going beyond that generalization of observed facts which is absurdly called 'Baconian' induction. But any one who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and any one who has studied the history of science knows that almost every step therein has been made by the 'Anticipation of Nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with; and not infrequently, in spite of a long career of usefulness, turned out to be wholly erroneous in the long run."

While Aristotle's biological investigations were devoted chiefly to animals, his pupil and co-worker, Theophrastus (370-286 B. c.), made profound studies on plants, and the list of botanical facts which he observed and in many cases discovered includes nearly all the rudi

3Aristotle: History of Animals, I, 6. H. F. Osborn: From the Greeks to Darwin, 1894, pp. 16-17, 47. T. H. Huxley: On Certain Errors Respecting the Heart Attributed to Aristotle, 1879 (Coll. Sci. Memoirs, IV, pp. 380-392); G. H. Lewes : Aristotle; a Chapter in the History of Science, 1864, pp. 108-13. T. E. Jones: Aristotle's Researches in Natural Science, 1912. W. Whewell: The Philosophy of Discovery, 1860.

4T. H. Huxley: The Progress of Science, 1887 (Coll. Essays, vol. 1, p. 62.)

ments of scientific botany. It is a remarkable fact that many details in plant anatomy, which were figured by the pioneers with the microscope, are to be found in the pages of Theophrastus.5 He not only laid the foundations of botany, but also gave suggestions of much of the superstructure; an achievement which entitles him to rank as "the first of real botanists in point of time."

With the Greeks, then, biology emerged from the shadows of the past and took concrete form—a fact which apparently the discerning mind of Aristotle appreciated since, though frequently referring to the ancients, he writes:

Mine is the

I found no basis prepared; no models to copy. first step, and therefore a small one, though worked out with much thought and hard labor. It must be looked at as a first step and judged with indulgence.

Before leaving the Greeks we must mention Hippocrates (460-370 B. C.), the Father of Medicine. Writing a generation before Aristotle, at the height of the Age of Pericles, Hippocrates crystallized the knowledge of medicine into a science, dissociated it from philosophy, and gave to physicians "the highest moral inspiration they have." "To him medicine owes the art of clinical inspection and observation, and he is, above all, the exemplar of that flexible, critical, wellpoised attitude of mind, ever on the lookout for sources of error, which is the very essence of the scientific spirit. . . . The revival of the Hippocratic methods in the seventeenth century and their triumphant vindication by the concerted scientific movement of the nineteenth, is the whole history of internal medicine.""

Medicine, the most important aspect of applied biology, is the foster parent of zoology and botany since a large proportion of biological advances have been the work of physicians. Until relatively recently the schools of medicine afforded the only training, and the practice of medicine the chief livelihood for men interested especially in general biological problems. The history of medicine and of biology, as a so-called pure science, are so inextricably interwoven that the consideration of one involves that of the other. Indeed the physicians form the only bond of continuity in biological history between Greece and Rome. The chief interest of the Romans lay in technology, and therefore it is natural that the practical advantages to be gained would ensure the advance of medicine. As it happens, however, two Greek physicians were destined to have the most influence: Dioscorides, (c. 64 A. D.), an army surgeon under Nero, and Galen (131-201 A. d.), physician to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son, Commodus. Just as Theophrastus established botany as a pure science, so

5E. L. Greene: Landmarks of Botanical History, 1909, pp. 52, 53, 140-142. 6A. Haller: Bibliotheca Botanica, I, 31.

7F. H. Garrison: History of Medicine, 2d ed., 1917, p. 82.

8T. H. Huxley: The Connection of the Biological Sciences with Medi

cine. Nature, 24, 1881, pp. 342-46; (Also in Coll. Essays).

9W. Libby: An Introduction to the History of Science, 1917, Chapter 3.