what they infer; and yet this rule is unintentionally violated from one to three times, on the average, during each recitation. The students prepare in class detailed descriptions of plants they are studying, and then determine the species by using Gray's "Flora" with its several keys. After each statement of a characteristic in the key the student must pronounce judgment, subject to the criticism of the class and teacher. In this way the students are led not only to observe closely, but also to cultivate the habit of truthtelling, a practice that is exceedingly rare even in brief conversations. The ability to classify a specimen, while in itself a pleasure, also doubles the pleasure of collecting, as all know who have tried it, and greatly increases the range of objects collected.

As before stated, the young naturalists of Kansas sadly lack keys to Kansas specimens, and manuals describing their habits or qualities and economic importance.

Now that the members of this Academy have prepared fairly complete lists of the mamals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects and other invertebrates; and of the algae, fungi, mosses, ferns and flowering plants of Kansas, why, as before suggested, may not this Academy, through special committees, take up the work of preparing natural histories of our animals and plants, each history having its working key to the groups described? Other states have prepared these manuals with predominant economic features, and why may not Kansas? It must be done largely as a work of love; but a wonderful impetus would thus be given to the study of the sciences by the members of this Academy, by the students in the various schools of the state, and by independent workers throughout Kansas.

The third and highest stage in the development of the sciences is that of philosophy, a stage in which we love wisdom for its own sake; where man comes nearest "to thinking the thoughts of God after Him."

When naturalists have collected an abundance of data from the various fields of research among the myriad forms of plant and animal life; when scientists have classified these data in all possible ways, using, for instance, as bases, form, structure, food-gettinghabits, modes of offense and defense, tendencies to variation, methods of development from the fertilized egg, and the lines of development of the fossil forms dug out of the crust of the earth; and when master scientists shall have taken these classifications of the observed facts, and all the hypotheses and theories of science, and shall have sorted and arranged them with due regard to perspective,

then observation towers will be erected, with tops lifted so far above the bewildering maze of the myriad facts of observation that wide surveys can be made of the dominant truths of God's universe, and heaven-reaching generalizations be made by these master scientists, the true philosophers.

The scientific method of research provides that deduction shall follow, not precede, induction. The visions of truth, the inductions of the scientist-philosophers, help wonderfully in rectifying the work of the systematist, and in showing the naturalist where to observe, where to experiment, and where to collect.

This world does not need more potential energy so much as it needs to know how to transform more of it into useful forms of kinetic energy. So in the formation of the collecting habit, we do not need to urge more people to make collections, but we do need to urge more people to make collections that are valuable, that are useful.

It is to be deplored, for instance, that sane men and women should use valuable time in making collections of buttons, tobacco tags, old shoes, luggage labels, and postage-stamps. Not only do such collectors waste time and effort on their collections, but they also waste energy in the form of hard cash. One European collector was so dominated by the subconscious craze for the possession of rare specimens that he paid $3500 for a poorly printed two-cent stamp issued some years since by Hawaii. A blue stamp issued by a Baltimore postmaster before our general government took charge of the mails sells for $4400, and a one-cent stamp issued by Mauritius in 1847 sold recently for $4840. A Confederate silver dollar is valued at $1500, and one issued by the United States in 1804 is quoted at $1000. This craze for rare things assumes a psuedo-literary phase when collectors offer $8000 for an eighthcentury manuscript of Homer's "Iliad," $6450 for the original manuscript of Scott's "Lady of the Lake," and $5250 for the autobiography of Lord Nelson in his own handwriting.

Even natural-history specimens bring absurdly high prices. Α Rocky Mountain prospector ate for breakfast six eggs of the Yellow pheasant, and learned ten minutes later, to the discomfort of his digestive organs, that the eggs were worth exactly $100 each. At the time of the tulip craze in Holland, hundred-dollar tulip bulbs were common, and thousand-dollar bulbs not uncommon.

The inductions of the scientist-philosopher also serve a most excellent purpose in correcting the imperfect inductions of the scientist. It is said by G. H. Lewes that Herbert Spencer was

not so much a naturalist or scientist as philosopher; and yet his philosophic grasp of first principles enabled him to correct his friend Huxley, one of the greatest of comparative anatomists, and Hewlings Jackson, a very eminent authority on the pathology of the nervous system, in some questions of fact respecting the comparative anatomy and pathology of the cerebellum.

Spencer had had very limited opportunities for studying the comparative anatomy of animals; but his mind, skilled in philosophy, had seized and retained the essential facts of comparative anatomy as they were presented to him in conversation, in the course of his reading, and in his limited opportunities for observation, and he was thus enabled to correct specialists in their own fields of research.

These remarkable powers of the scientist-philosopher seem at times almost miraculous to those uneducated in scientific methods. He tells the astronomer where to point his instrument to discover anew world. The astronomer obeys and, behold, it is there! Or he tells the chemist that elements of certain atomic weights are needed to fill gaps in the arrangement of the elements according to the periodic law, and the chemist goes to his laboratory and finds them.

In a paper read at the Topeka meeting, objection was made by your speaker to the attempts of certain biologists to make biology a mathematical science, as are physics, chemistry, and astronomy. It was declared in the paper that the mathematician is concerned with the investigation of certain exactly statable postulates or hypotheses; that in biology, on the contrary, the one who uses the method of the mathematician can meet only with wrong results, for life obeys no law other than its own highest good, and this cannot be stated in mathematically exact terms. If the following para- ́ graphs taken from Science are true, the above statement seems to need modification.

In Science for August 11, 1905, Dr. George Bruce Halstead, of Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, discusses the relationship of biology to the new mathematics, the mathematics that has given us the non-Euclidian geometry. I quote from this article. Doctor

Halstead says:

"Thus, as the Russian, Alexeieff, has pointed out, after the continuity world scheme had captured the fundamental natural sciences geometry, mechanics, astronomy, physics, chemistry-had entrenched itself in them and dowered them with generality, uniformity, universality, it went over gradually with scientific investigators,

by habit, so to say, into flesh and blood, and began to penetrate and dominate in physiology, in psychology, in sociology, in biology. . . . So we have the doctrine of a fatalist causality, denial of efficient freedom of the will, belittling of the idealistic endeavor of mankind; hence the pessimistic attitude toward the whole of human existence. . . . But the latest advances in mathematics have rendered unnecessary for biology the wearing of this misfit garment.

"The new mathematics gives now a standpoint for the explanation and treatment of natural phenomena from which the biologic elements need not be suppressed.

"The continuity thought way strives to reduce all phenomena of nature to a general mechanism with fate-determined movement. Just contrary to this, then, is the view that living nature is a rationally correlated realm, in which everything is harmonic, shows adaptation, strives toward perfection."

This discovery that discontinuous variation in biology is in accord with non-Euclidian mathematics relieves students of life problems from the necessity of declaring that the method of studying the life sciences differs widely from the method of studying the mathematical and physical sciences. Darwin tried to conform in his great theory of evolution to the Euclidian continuity theory of mathematics; but the occurrence of sports among plants and animals was fatal to his theory of continuous variation. Darwin's appeal to natural selection to account for wide gaps in the ranks of plant and animal species also failed, for nature could select or reject only what life offered; and life has always persisted in offering those forms of individuals which contain parts possessed by generations of ancestors, and rarely a form with a few parts, found, perhaps, in one individual in a million, never before found on earth. These individuals, those given the new structures, and called sports or mutations, cannot be accounted for by peculiarities of environment, for they and the environment may or may not

agree.

Burbank's experiments in plant-breeding have demonstrated that each species is the sum total of all past strains of heredity more or less modified by their interaction. When several species are crossed by pollination, no man knows what may be the outcome. In 100,000 hybrids produced by such crossing, Mr. Burbank found all shades of intermediate characters and many new ones. Selecting from these hundreds of thousands of hybrids those that possessed the qualities he desired, and destroying the rest, Mr.

Burbank has obtained dozens of new forms of fruits, flowers, and forage plants. By hybridization and selection he has been able to change, almost at will, old hereditary instincts and obtain the new ones he desired. Slightly modifying Mr. Burbank's statements respecting his work, he may be said to have found in his ten or fifteen years of wonderful experimentation that the powers possessed by life are the resultant of a mixed heredity from thousands of ancestors, and are, and have been, modified by life to better meet the conditions imposed by environment.

Thus the observations of Burbank as to what constitutes the true mainsprings of variation have still further emancipated life from the Darwinian, materialistic, continuity theory of variation. Thus enthroned in the thoughts of modern scientists, life may now be studied as she manifests herself in myriads of living forms, produced at her own sweet will and varied at pleasure, without invoking any tropism theory to account for her activities, or any Weismann germ plasm theory, or any Mendelian law, to limit her power to transmit her qualities or to vary them in her descendants by her own conscious powers.

Untrammeled by olden-time restrictions, the study of life has progressed by leaps and bounds. The now universally accepted theory of evolution requires that all life activities on earth shall follow one another in a definitely established order: (1) The simple shall precede the complex; (2) the variable shall end in becoming stable; (3) new characters shall be added to the old, and may Overshadow and obscure them.

All evolutionists, therefore, may believe that the first activities of life were simple and variable and were consciously performed. By repetition, these in the individual, then as now, became habits. These habits persisted in by individuals for a series of generations became hereditary, subconscious activities, belonging to the species. And these, in turn, when they had lost the conscious ele

ment, became race instincts.

This generalization made necessary in teaching biology with life. as the dominant influence has relieved the classroom of a world of trouble in explaining the relationship of reason to instinct, and of both to subconscious activity.

For example, if we regard nest-building as a subconscious activity all difficulties of explanation vanish. The tendency to build nests is instinctive and hereditary, while the act of building the nest is consciously performed and may be varied at the pleasure of the bird, as observation teaches.