Biology needs no apologist when she demands a place—­and a prominent place—­in any scheme of education worthy of the name.  Leave out the Physiological sciences from your curriculum, and you launch the student into the world, undisciplined in that science whose subject-matter would best develop his powers of observation; ignorant of facts of the deepest importance for his own and others’ welfare; blind to the richest sources of beauty in God’s creation; and unprovided with that belief in a living law, and an order manifesting itself in and through endless change and variety, which might serve to check and moderate that phase of despair through which, if he take an earnest interest in social problems, he will assuredly sooner or later pass.

Finally, one word for myself.  I have not hesitated to speak strongly where I have felt strongly; and I am but too conscious that the indicative and imperative moods have too often taken the place of the more becoming subjunctive and conditional.  I feel, therefore, how necessary it is to beg you to forget the personality of him who has thus ventured to address you, and to consider only the truth or error in what has been said.

FOOTNOTES: 

[4] “In the third place, we have to review the method of Comparison, which is so specially adapted to the study of living bodies, and by which, above all others, that study must be advanced.  In Astronomy, this method is necessarily inapplicable; and it is not till we arrive at Chemistry that this third means of investigation can be used, and then only in subordination to the two others.  It is in the study, both statical and dynamical, of living bodies that it first acquires its full development; and its use elsewhere can be only through its application here.”—­COMTE’S Positive Philosophy, translated by Miss Martineau.  Vol. i. p. 372.

By what method does M. Comte suppose that the equality or inequality of forces and quantities and the dissimilarity or similarity of forms—­points of some slight importance not only in Astronomy and Physics, but even in Mathematics—­are ascertained, if not by Comparison?

[5] “Proceeding to the second class of means,—­Experiment cannot but be less and less decisive, in proportion to the complexity of the phaenomena to be explored; and therefore we saw this resource to be less effectual in chemistry than in physics:  and we now find that it is eminently useful in chemistry in comparison with physiology. In fact, the nature of the phaenomena seems to offer almost insurmountable impediments to any extensive and prolific application of such a procedure in biology.”—­Comte, vol i. p. 367.

M. Comte, as his manner is, contradicts himself two pages further on, but that will hardly relieve him from the responsibility of such a paragraph as the above.

[6] “Nouvelle Fonction du Foie considere comme organe producteur de matiere sucree chez l’Homme et les Animaux,” par M. Claude Bernard.