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THE ROMANES LECTURE 
 1905" 
 
 3%ature and <JlIan 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWIN RAY LANKESTER 
 
 M.A., Hon. D.Sc, F.R.S. 
 
 HON. FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE 
 
 DIRECTOR OP THE NATURAL HISTORY DEPARTMENTS OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM 
 
 LATE LINACRE PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 DELIVERED 
 
 IN THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE, OXFORD 
 JUNE 14, 190S 
 
 OXFORD 
 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 
 1905^ 
 
HENRY FROWDE, M.A. 
 
 PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 LONDON, EDINBURGH 
 
 NEW YORK AND TORONTO 
 
NATURE AND MAN 
 
 Mr. Vice-Chancellor, Masters and Schplars of the 
 University of Oxford, 
 
 There are, L think, few who might be called upon 
 to deliver the annual Romanes lecture before this 
 ancient and glorious University who could feel more 
 deeply sensible of the honour conferred on them 
 than I do ; few who could be more grateful for the 
 kindness and consideration which the invitation to 
 give this lecture, implies. And no one, I think, 
 could be more keenly aware than 1 am of the 
 responsibility of the task undertaken and of his own 
 deficiency in those' qualities which are needful in 
 order that the lecturer may do justice to the occasion. 
 Great and eloquent men, leaders of thought, some 
 occupying high position in the State, have been 
 among my predecessors. It is, then, with great 
 diffidence that I address you. I cannot forget .in 
 doing so, that I have not only passed through early 
 days at the knees of our Alma Mater, but have 
 spent the best years of my life under her shelter, 
 nourished and encouraged by her bounty, and that 
 I am speaking to many who have been my friends 
 and cqmpanions. Difficulties and anxieties of a 
 special kind belong to such a situation. But I know 
 from experience that I may count upon your for- 
 bearance and generosity, and I trust that whatever 
 
 a 2 
 
4 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 criticism I may incur, the profession which I hereby 
 make of reverence and affection for our University, 
 and of true sympathy with those who to-day carry 
 on her manifold labours, will be accepted as no mere 
 formal statement, but as the expression of a deep-rooted 
 sentiment. 
 
 It is a pleasure to me, at this moment, to call to 
 mind my friendship with the gifted man who founded 
 this lectureship, and to join my tribute with that of 
 so many others, to his high qualities. The know- 
 ledge of Nature lost a true and eager searcher when 
 his labours ceased. 
 
 I. Choice of a Subject. 
 
 In choosing a subject for the discourse which it 
 is my privilege to deliver to-day, I have ventured to 
 select one which has largely occupied the attention 
 of biologists during the five and forty years in which 
 I have followed the results of scientific discovery. 
 The title which describes it must, I fear, seem 
 unduly ambitious since Nature and Man comprise 
 well-nigh every topic with which such a discourse 
 can deal. My desire, however, is more modest than 
 my advertisement. It has become more and more 
 a matter of conviction to me— and I believe that 
 I share that conviction with a large body of fellow 
 students both in this country and other civilized 
 states — that the time has arrived when the true 
 relation of Nature to Man has been so clearly 
 ascertained that it should be more generally known 
 than is at present the case, and that this knowledge 
 should form far more largely than it does at this 
 moment, the object of human activity and endeavour 
 
Nature and Man 5 
 
 —that it should be, in fact, the guide of state-govern- 
 ment and the trusted basis of the development of 
 human communities. That it is not so already, that 
 men should still allow their energies to run in other 
 directions, appears to some of us a thing so monstrous, 
 so injurious to the prosperity, of our fellow men, that 
 we must do what lies within our. power to draw 
 attention to the conditions and circumstances which 
 attend this neglect, the evils arising from it, and the 
 benefits which must follow from its abatement. 
 
 It is not unfitting that a son of Oxford should in 
 the fuUitess of time place before his Alma Mater con- 
 clusions which he has formed on a matter of serious 
 and far-reaching importance. Oxford has been said 
 to be the home of lost causes. It is true that her 
 hospitality and benevolence are such that she is the 
 home both of causes which triumph and of causes 
 which are defeated; but it may be more aptly said 
 that it is her splendid distinction, when corrupting 
 greed and glorified ignorance are so largely dominant 
 in the national life, still to be the birth-place of high 
 aspirations, still the shelter and sanctuary of noble 
 ideals. I therefore, with confidence in the generosity 
 of my audience, venture to lay before you what I have 
 to say. 
 
 2. The word ' Nature.' 
 
 The signification attached to the word 'Nature' is 
 by no means the same at the present day as it has 
 been in the past: as commonly used it is a word of 
 varied meanings and limitations, so that misconception 
 and confusion is liable to be associated with it. By 
 the professed student of modern sciences it is usually 
 understood as a name for the entire mechanism of 
 
6 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 the universe, the kosmos in all its parts ; and it is in 
 this sense that I use it. But many still identify 
 'Nature' AKdth a limited portion of that great system, 
 and even retain for it a special application to the 
 animals and plants of this earth and their immediate 
 surroundings. Thus we have the term ' natural history ' 
 and the French term 'les sciences naturelles' limited 
 to the study of the more immediate and concrete forms 
 of animals, plants, and crystals. There is some justifica- 
 tion for separating the conception of Nature as specially 
 concerned in the production and maintenance of living 
 things from that larger Nature which embraces together 
 with this small but deeply significant area, the whole 
 expanse of the heavens in the one direction and Man 
 himself in the other. Giordano Bruno, who a little 
 more than 300 years ago stood here in Oxford where 
 we are now met, was perhaps the first to perceive and 
 teach the unity of this greater Nature, anticipating 
 thus in his prophetic vision the conclusion which we 
 now accept as the result of an accumulated mass of 
 evidence. Shakespeare came into touch with Bruno's 
 conception, and has contrasted the more limited and 
 a larger (though not the largest) view of Nature in the 
 words of Perdita and Polyxenes. Sajrs Perdita : — 
 
 ' . . . the fairest flowers o' the season 
 
 Are our carnations, and streak'd gillyvors, 
 
 Which some call nature's bastards ; of that kind 
 
 Our rustic garden 's barren ; and I care not 
 
 To get slips of them. . . . For I have heard it said, 
 
 There is an art which, in their piedness, shares 
 
 With great creating nature.' 
 
 To which Polyxenes replies : — 
 
 'Say there be — 
 Yet nature is made better by no mean, 
 
Nature and Man 7 
 
 But nature jnakes that mean : so, over that art, 
 
 Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art 
 
 That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry 
 
 A gentler scion to the wildest stock ; 
 
 And make conceive a bark of baser kind 
 
 By bud of nobler race ; this is an art 
 
 Which does mend nature,— change it, rather: but 
 
 The art itself is nature.' 
 
 The larger proportion of so-called educated people 
 even at the present day have not got beyond Perdita's 
 view of Nature. They regard the territory of Nature 
 as a limited one, the play-ground or sport of all sorts 
 of non-natural demons and fairies, spirits and occult 
 agencies. Apart from any definite scheme or concep- 
 tion of these operations, they personify Nature and 
 attribute a variety of virtues and tendencies to her for 
 which there is no justification. We are told, according 
 to the fancy of the speaker, that such a course is in 
 accordance with Nature; that another course is con- 
 trary to Nature ; we are urged to return to Nature and 
 we are also urged to resist Nature. We hear that 
 Nature will find a remedy for every ill, that Nature, is 
 just, that Nature is cruel, that Nature is sweet and our 
 loving mother. On the one hand Man is regarded as 
 outside of and opposed to Nature, and his dealings are 
 contrasted favourably or unfavourably with those of 
 Nature. On the other hand we are informed that Man 
 must after all submit to Nature and that it is useless 
 to oppose her. These contradictory views are in fact 
 fragments of various systems of philosophy of various 
 ages in which the word ' Nature ' has been assigned 
 equally various limitations and extensions. Without 
 attempting to discuss the history and justification of 
 these different uses of the word Nature, I think that 
 
8 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 I may ask those here present to allow me to use the 
 word Nature as indicating the entire kosmos of which 
 this cooling globe with all upon it is a portion. 
 
 3. Nature-searchers. 
 
 The discovery of regular processes, of expected 
 effects following upon specified antecedents, of constant 
 properties and qualities in the material around him, 
 has from the earliest recorded times been a chief 
 occupation of Man and has led to the attainment by 
 Man of an extraordinarily complex control of the con- 
 ditions in which his life is carried on. But it was not 
 until Bruno's conception of the unity of terrestrial 
 nature with that of the kosmos had commended itself 
 that a deliberate and determined investigation of natural 
 processes, with a view to their more complete appre- 
 hension, was instituted. One of the earliest and most 
 active steps in this direction was the foundation less 
 than 250 years ago of the Royal Society of London for 
 the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, by a body of 
 students who had organized their- conferences and 
 inquiries whilst resident in Oxford ^ 
 
 All over Western Europe such associations or aca- 
 demies for the building up of the New Philosophy 
 (as it was called here) came into existence. It is a fact 
 which is strangely overlooked at the present day, when 
 the assumption is made that the acquirement of a know- 
 ledge of Greek grammar is the traditional and imme- 
 morial occupation of Oxford students — that until the 
 modern days of the eighteenth century ('modern' in 
 the history of Oxford) Greek was less known in Oxford 
 than Hebrew is at present, and that the study of Nature 
 — Nature-knowledge and Nature-control— was the appro- 
 
Nature and Man g 
 
 priate occupation of her learned men. It is indeed 
 a fact that the very peculiar classical education at 
 present insisted on in Oxford, and imposed by her on 
 the public schools of the country, is a modern innova- 
 tion, an unintentional and, in a biological sense, 'morbid' 
 outgrowth of that ' Humanism ' to which a familiarity 
 with the dead languages was, but is no longer, the 
 pathway. 
 
 4. The Doctrine of Evolution. 
 
 What is sometimes called the scientific movement, 
 but may be more appropriately described as the Nature- 
 searching movement, rapidly attained an immense 
 development. In tHe latter half of the last century 
 this culminated in so complete a knowledge of the 
 movements of the heavenly bodies, their chemical 
 nature and physical condition, so detailed a determina- 
 tion of the history of the crust of this earth and of the 
 living things . upon it, of the chemical and physical 
 processes which go on in Man and other living things, 
 and of the structure of Man as compared with the 
 animals most like him, and of the enormous length 
 of time during which Man has existed on the earth, 
 that it became possible to establish a general doctrine 
 of the evolution of the kosmos, with more special 
 detail in regard to the history of this earth and the 
 development of Man from a lower animal ancestry. 
 Animals were, in their turn, shown to have deve- 
 loped from simplest living matter, and this from less 
 highly elaborated compiounds of chemical 'elements' 
 differentiated at a still earlier stage of evolution. 
 There is, it may be said without exaggeration, no 
 school or body, of thinkers at the present day who are 
 
lo The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 acquainted with the facts now ascertained, which denies 
 the orderly evolution of the Jcosmos by the regular 
 operation of a more or less completely ascertained 
 series of properties resident in the material of which 
 it consists. The process of evolution — the interaction 
 of these ascertainable, if not fully ascertained, proper- 
 ties—has led (it is held), in the case of the cooling cinder 
 which we call the earth — by an inevitable and predes- 
 tined course — to the formation of that which we call 
 living matter and eventually of Man himself. From this 
 process all disorderly or arbitrary interferences must, it 
 seems, be excluded. The old fancies as to presiding 
 demons or fairies, which it was imagined had for their 
 business to interrupt the supposed feeble and limited 
 efforts of Nature, as yet unexplored and unappreciated, 
 have passed out of mind. The consensus is complete : 
 Man is held to be a part of Nature, a product. of the 
 definite and orderly evolution which is universal ; a 
 being resulting from and driven by the one great nexus 
 of mechanism which we call Nature. He stands alone, 
 face to face with that relentless mechanism. It is his 
 destiny to understand and to control it. 
 
 5. Unwarranted inferences from the 
 Evolution of Man. 
 
 There are not wanting those who, accepting this 
 conclusion, seek to belittle Man and endeavour to 
 represent that the veil is lifted, that all is 'explained,' 
 obvious, commonplace, and mean in regard to the 
 significance of life and of Man, because it has become 
 clear that the kosmic process has brought them forth 
 in due order. There are others who rightly perceive 
 that life is no common property of our cooling matter, 
 
Nature and Man ii 
 
 but unique and exceptional, and that Man stands apart 
 from and above all natural products, whether animate or 
 inanimate. Some of these thinkers appear to accept the 
 conclusion that if life and Man are regarded as products 
 of the kosmic process — that is, of Nature— ' life ' and 
 ' Man ' lose so much in importance and significance that 
 dire consequences must follow to Man's conception of 
 his dignity and to the essential features of his systems 
 of conduct and social organization. Accordingly they 
 cling to the belief that living matter and Man have 
 not proceeded from an orderly evolution of Nature, 
 but are ' super ' natural. It is found on the other hand, 
 by many who have considered these speculations, and 
 hold no less explicitly than do the ' supematuralists/ 
 that life is a momentous and peculiar feature of our 
 earth's surface and Man the isolated and unparalleled 
 ' piece of work,' ' the beauty of the world,' ' the paragon 
 of animals' — it is found by many such, I say, that 
 nothing is gained in regard to our conception of Man's 
 nobility and significance by supposing that he and the 
 living matter which has given rise to him, are not 
 the outcome of that system of orderly processes which 
 we call Nature. 
 
 There is one consideration in regard to this matter 
 which, it seems, is often overlooked and should be 
 emphasized. It is sometimes, and perhaps with a 
 sufficient excuse in a want of acquaintance with 
 Nature, held by those who oppose the conclusion that 
 Man has been evolved by natural processes, that the 
 products of Nature are arbitrary, haphazard, and due 
 to chance, and that Man cannot be conceived of as 
 originating by chance. This notion of 'chance' is 
 a misleading figment inherited by the modern world 
 
12 The' Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 from days of blank ignorance. The ' Nature-searchei^ ' 
 of to-day admit no such possibility as ' chance.' It will 
 be in the recollection of many here, that a leading 
 writer and investigator of the Victorian Era, the 
 physicist John Tyndall, pointed out in a celebrated 
 address delivered at Belfast that -according to the con- 
 ceptions of the mechanism of Nature arrived at by 
 modern science — the structure of that mechanism is 
 such that it would have been possible for a being of 
 adequate intelligence inspecting the gaseous nebula 
 from which our planetary system has evolved to have 
 foreseen in that luminous vapour the Belfast audience 
 and the professor addressing it! The fallacy that in 
 given but unknown circumstances anything whatever 
 may occur in spite of the fact that some one thing has 
 been irrevocably arranged to occur, is a common one "- 
 It is correct to assume in the absence of any pertinent 
 knowledge (if we are compelled to estimate the pro- 
 babilities) that one event is as likely as another to 
 occur; but nevertheless there is no 'chance' in the 
 matter since the event has been already determined, 
 and might be predicted by those possessing the know- 
 ledge which we lack. Thus then it appears that the 
 conclusion that Man is a part of Nature is by no means 
 equivalent to asserting that he has originated by ' blind 
 chance ' : it is in fact a specific assertion that he is the 
 predestined outcome of an orderly— and to a large 
 extent ' perceptible ' — mechanism. 
 
 6. Nature's Mode of Producing Organic 
 
 Forms. 
 The general process by which the higher and more 
 elaborate forms of life, and eventually man himself, have 
 
Nature and Man 13 
 
 been produced has been shown by Darwin to depend 
 upon two important properties of living matter mani- 
 fested in connexion with the multiplication of individuals. 
 Living matter has a special property of adding to its 
 bulk by taking up the chemical elements which it re- 
 quires and building up the food so taken as additional 
 living matter. It further has the power of separating 
 from itself minute particles or germs which feed and 
 grow independently, and thus multiply their kind. It 
 is a fundamental character of this process of repro- 
 duction that the detached or pullulated germ inherits 
 or carries with it from its parents the peculiarities of 
 form and structure of its parent. This is the property 
 known as Heredity. It is most essentially modified 
 by another property — namely, that though eventually 
 growing to be closely like the parent, the germ (especi- 
 ally when it is formed, as is usual, by the fusion of two 
 germs from two separate parents) is never identical in 
 all respects with the parent. It shows Variation. In 
 virtue of Heredity, the new congenital variations shown 
 by a new generation are transmitted to their oflFspring 
 when in due time they pullulate or produce germs. 
 Man has long been aware of this; and, by selecting 
 variations of beasts, birds, or plants agreeable or useful 
 to him, has intensified such variations and produced 
 animals and plants in many features very unlike those 
 with which he started. 
 
 It was Darwin's merit to show that a process of selec- 
 tion which he called 'Natural Selection ' must take place 
 in the free untouched conditions under which animals 
 and plants exist, and have existed for ages, on this globe. 
 Both animals and plants produce germs, or young, in 
 excess— usually in vast excess. The world, the earth's 
 
14 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 surface, is practically full, that is to say, fully occupied. 
 Only one pair of young can ^ow up to take the place of 
 the pair — male and female — which have launched a dozen, 
 or it may be as many as a hundred thousand, young indi- 
 viduals on the world. The property of Variation ensures 
 that amongst this excess of young there are many 
 differences. Eventually those survive which are most 
 fitted to the special conditions under which this particular 
 organism has to live. The conditions may, and indeed 
 in long lapses of time must, change, and thus some 
 variation not previously favoured will gain the day and 
 survive. The 'struggle for existence' of Darwin is 
 the struggle amongst all the superabundant young of 
 a given species, in a given area, to gain the necessary 
 food, to escape voracious enemies, and gain protection 
 from excesses of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness. 
 One pair in the new generation — only one pair — survive 
 for every parental pair. Animal population does not 
 increase : ' Increase and multiply' has never been said by 
 Nature to her lower creatures. Locally, and from time 
 to time, owing to exceptional changes, a species may 
 multiply here and decrease there ; but it is important to 
 realize that the ' struggle for existence ' in Nature — that 
 is to say, among the animals and plants of this earth 
 untouched by man — is a desperate one, however tranquil 
 and peaceful the battle-field may appear to us. The 
 struggle for existence takes place, not as a clever French 
 writer* glibly informs his readers, between different 
 species, but between individuals of the same species, 
 brothers and sisters and cousins. The struggle between 
 a beast of prey which seeks to nourish itself and the 
 buffalo which defends its life with its horns is not ' the 
 struggle for existence' so named by Darwin. More- 
 
Nature and Man 15 
 
 over, the struggle among the members of a species in 
 natural conditions differs totally from the mere struggle 
 for advancement or wealth with which uneducated 
 writers so frequently compare it. It differs essentially 
 in this— that in Nature's struggle for existence, death, 
 immediate obliteration, is the fate of the vanquished, 
 whilst the only reward to the victors — few, very few, 
 but rare and beautiful in the fitness which has carried 
 them to victory — is the permission to reproduce their 
 kind — to carry on by heredity to another generation 
 the specific qualities by which they triumphed. 
 
 It is not generally realized how severe is the pressure 
 and competition in Nature — not between different species, 
 but between the immature population of one and the 
 same species, precisely because they are of the same 
 species and have exactly the same needs. From a human 
 point of view the pressure under which many wild 
 things live is awful in its severity and relentless tenacity. 
 Not only are new forms established by natural selec- 
 tion, but the old forms, when they exactly fit the mould 
 presented as it were for competitive filling, are main- 
 tained by the same unremitting process. A distinctive 
 quality in the beauty of natural productions in which 
 man delights is due to the unobtrusive yet tremendous 
 slaughter of the unfit which is incessantly going on, and 
 the absolute restriction of the privilege of parentage to 
 the happy few who attain to the standard described as 
 ' the fittest.' 
 
 7. The Limited Variety of Nature's 
 Products. 
 
 The process of development of an immense variety 
 of animal and vegetable forms has proceeded in this 
 
i6 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 way through countless ages of geologic time, but it 
 must not be supposed that any and every conceivable 
 form and variety has been produced. There are only 
 two great diverging lines of descent from original living 
 matter — only the animals and the plants. And in each 
 of these there are and have been only a limited number 
 of branches to the pedigree — some coming off at a lower 
 level, others at higher points when more elaborate struc- 
 ture has been attained. It is easy to imagine groups of 
 both plants and animals with characters and structures 
 which have never existed and never will exist. The 
 limitation of the whole process in spite of its enormous 
 duration in time, its gigantic output and variety, is a strik- 
 ing and important fact. Linnaeus said, ' There are just 
 as many species as in the beginning the Infinite Being 
 created'; and the modern naturalist can go no further 
 than the paraphrase of this, and must say, ' There are 
 and have been just so many and just so few varieties 
 of animal and vegetable structure op this earth as it was 
 possible for the physical and chemical contents of the 
 still molten globe to form up to the hour now reached.'.. 
 
 8. The Emergence of Man. 
 
 • As to how and when man emerged from the terres- 
 trial animal population so strictly controlled and moulded 
 by natural selection is a matter upon which we gain 
 further information year by year. There must be many 
 here who remember, as I do, the astounding and almost 
 sudden discovery some forty-five years ago of abundant 
 and overwhelming evidence that man had existed in 
 Western Europe as a . contemporary of the mammoth 
 and rhinoceros, the hyaena and the lion. The dispute. 
 
Nature and Man 17 
 
 over the facts submitted to the scientific world by Bou- 
 cher de Perthes was violent and of short duration. The 
 immense antiquity of man was established and accepted 
 on all sides just before Mr. Darwin published his book 
 on The Origin of Species. The palaeolithic imple- 
 ments, though not improbably made 150,000 yearsago, 
 do not, any more than do the imperfect skulls occasion- 
 ally found in association with them, indicate a condition 
 of the human race more monkey-lik^ than is presented 
 by existing savage races. The implements themselves 
 are manufactured with great skill and artistic feeling. 
 Within the last ten years much rougher flint imple- 
 ments, of peculiar types, have been discovered in 
 gravels which are 500 feet above the level of the 
 existing rivers. These Eoliths of the South of England 
 indicate a race bf men of less-developed skill than the 
 makers of the Palaeoliths, and carry the antiquity of 
 man at least as far back beyond the Palaeoliths as these 
 are from the present day. We have as yet found no 
 remains giving the direct basis for conclusions on the 
 subject ; but judging by the analogy (not by any means 
 a conclusive method) furnished by the history of other 
 large animals now living alongside of man — such as the 
 horse, the rhinoceros, ' the tapir, the wolf, the hyaena, 
 and the bear — it is not improbable that it was in the 
 remote period known as the lower Miocene— remote 
 as compared with the gravels in which. Eoliths occur — 
 that Natural Selection began to favour that increase in 
 the size of the brain of a large and not very powerful 
 semi-erect ape which eventuated, after some hundreds 
 of thousands of years, in the breeding-out of a being 
 with a relatively enormous brain-case, a skilful hand, • 
 and an inveterate tendency to throw stones, flourish 
 
i8 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 sticks, protect himself in caves, and in general to defeat 
 aggression and satisfy his natural appetites by the use 
 of his wits rather than by strength alone— in which, 
 however, he was not deficient. Probably this creature 
 had nearly the full size of brain and every other physical 
 character of modem man, although he had not as' yet 
 stumbled upon the art of making fire by friction, nor 
 converted his conventional grunts and groans, his 
 screams, laughter, and interjections into a language 
 corresponding to and thenceforth developing his power 
 of thought. 
 
 9. The Enlarged Brain. 
 
 The leading feature in the development and separa- 
 tion of man from amongst other animals is undoubtedly 
 the relatively enormous size of the brain in man, and 
 the corresponding increase in its activities and capacity. 
 It is a very striking fact that it was not in the ances- 
 tors of man alone that this increase in the size of the 
 brain took place at this same period, viz. the Miocene. 
 The great mammals such as the titanotherium, which 
 represented the rhinoceros in early Tertiary times, had 
 a brain which was in proportion to the bulk of the body, 
 not more than one-eighth the volume of the brain of the 
 modern rhinoceros.' Other great mammals of the earlier 
 Tertiary period were in the same case ; and the ancestors 
 of the horse, which are better known than those of any 
 other modern animal, certainly had very much smaller 
 brains in proportion to the size of their bodies than has 
 their descendant. 
 
 We may well ask to what this sudden and marked 
 increase in the size of the brain in several lines of the 
 animal pedigree is due. It seems that the inborn 
 
Nature and Man 19 
 
 hereditary nervous mechanism by which many simple 
 and necessary movements of the body are controlled 
 and brought into relation with the outer world acting 
 upon the sense-organs, can be carried in a relatively 
 small bulk of brain-substance. Fish, lizards, and cro- 
 codiles with their small brains carry on a complex and 
 eifective life of relation with their surroundings. It 
 appears that the increased bulk of cerebral substance 
 means increased ' educability ' — an increased power of 
 storing up individual experience — which tends to take 
 the place of the inherited mechanism with which it is 
 often in antagonism. The power of profiting by indi- 
 vidual experience, in fact educability, must in conditions 
 of close competition be, when other conditions are equal, 
 an immense advantage to its possessor. It seems that 
 we have to imagine that the adaptation of mammalian 
 form to the various conditions of life had in Miocene 
 times reached a point when further alteration and 
 elaboration of the various types, which we know then 
 existed, could lead to no advantage. The variations 
 presented for selection in the struggle for existence 
 presented no advantage^— the 'fittest' had practically 
 been reached, and was destined to survive with httle 
 change. Assuming such a relative lull in the develop- 
 ment of mere mechanical form, it is obvious that the 
 opportunity for those individuals with the most 'edu- 
 cable' brains to defeat their competitors would arise. 
 No marked improvement in the instrument being 
 possible, the reward, the triumph, the survival would 
 fall to those who possessed most skill in the use of the 
 instrument. And in successive generations the bigger 
 and more educable brains would survive and mate, and 
 thus bigger and bigger brains be produced. 
 
 B 2 
 
20 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 It would not be difficult (though not, perhaps, profit- 
 able) to imagine the conditions which have favoured the 
 continuation of this process to a far greater length in 
 the Simian line of the pedigree than in other mammalian 
 groups. The result is that the creature called Man 
 emerged with an educable brain of some five or six 
 times the bulk (in proportion to his size and weight) 
 of that of any other surviving Simian. Great as is this 
 difference, it is one of the most curious facts in the 
 history of man's development that the bulk of his 
 brain does not appear to have continued to increase 
 in any very marked degree since early Palaeolithic 
 times. The cranial capacity of many savage races and 
 of some of the most ancient human skulls is only a little 
 less than that of the average man of highly-civilized race. 
 The value of the mental activities in which primitive man 
 differs from the highest apes may be measured in some 
 degree by the difference in the size of the man's and 
 the ape's brain; but the difference in the size of the 
 brain of Isaac Newton and an Australian black-fellow is 
 not in the remotest degree proportionate to the differ- 
 ence in their mental qualities. Man, it would seem, 
 at a very remote period attained the extraordinary 
 development of brain which marked him off from the 
 rest of the animal world, but has ever since been 
 developing the powers and qualities of this organ with- 
 out increasing its size, or materially altering in other 
 bodily features*. 
 
 10, The Progress of Man. 
 
 The origin of Man by the process of Natural Selection 
 is one chapter in man's history; another one begins 
 
Nature and Man 21 
 
 with the consideration of his further development and 
 his diffusion over the surface of the globe. 
 
 The mental qualities which have developed in Man, 
 though traceable in a vague and rudimentary condition 
 in some of his animal associates, are of such an 
 unprecedented power and so far dominate everything 
 else in his activities as a living organism, that they 
 have to a very large extetit, if not entirely, cut him 
 off from the general operation % of that process of 
 Natural Selection and survival of the fittest which up 
 to their appearance had been the law of the living 
 world. They justify the view that Man forms a 
 new departure in the gradual unfolding of Nature's 
 predestined scheme. Knowledge, reason, self-con- 
 sciousness, will, are the attributes of Man. It is not 
 my purpose to attempt to trace their development 
 from lower phases of mental activity in man's animal 
 ancestors, nor even to suggest the steps by which 
 ' that development has proceeded. What we call the 
 will or volition of Man — a discussion of the nature and 
 limitation of which it would be impossible for me here 
 to offer and is happily not necessary for my present 
 purpose — has become a power in Nature; an imperium 
 in imperioy which has profoundly modified not only 
 man's own history but that of the whole living 
 world and the face of the planet on which he exists. 
 Nature's inexorable discipline of death to those who 
 do not rise to her standard — survival and parentage 
 for those alone who do— has been from the earliest 
 times more and more definitely resisted by the will 
 of Man. If we may for the purpose of analysis, as 
 it were, extract man from the rest of Nature of which 
 he is truly a product and part, then we may say that 
 
22 • The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 Man is Nature's rebel. Where Nature says 'Die!' 
 Man says ' Twill live.' According to the law previously 
 in universal operation, Man should have been limited 
 in geographical area, killed by extremes of cold or 
 of heat, subject to starvation if one kind of diet were 
 unobtainable, and unable to increase and multiply, just 
 as are his animal relatives, without losing his specific 
 structure and acquiring new physical characters accord- 
 ing to the requirements of the new conditions into 
 which he strayed, without in fact becoming a new mor- 
 phological ' species.' But man's wits and his will have 
 enabled him to cross rivers and oceans by rafts and 
 boats, to clothe himself against cold, to shelter himself 
 from heat and rain, to prepare an endless variety of 
 food by fire, and to 'increase and multiply' as no 
 other animal without change of form, without sub- 
 mitting to the terrible axe of selection wielded by 
 ruthless Nature over all other living things on this 
 globe. And as he has more and more obtained this 
 control over his surroundings, he has expanded that 
 unconscious protective attitude towards his immature 
 offspring which natural selection had already favoured 
 and established in the animal race, into a conscious 
 and larger love for his tribe, his race, his nationality, 
 and his kind. He has developed speech, the power 
 of communicating, and above all of recording and 
 handing on from generation to generation, his thought 
 and knowledge. He has formdd communities, built 
 cities, and set up empires. At every step of his progress 
 man has receded further and further from the ancient 
 rule exercised by Nature. He has advanced so far and 
 become so unfitted to the earlier rule, that to suppose 
 that Man can ' return to Nature ' is as unreasonable as to 
 
Nature and Man 23 
 
 suppose that an adult animal can return to its mother's 
 womb. 
 
 In early tribal times natural selection still imposed 
 the death penalty on failure. The stronger, the more 
 cunning,, the better armed, the more courageous tribe 
 or family group, exterminated by actual slaughter or 
 starvation the neighbouring tribes less gifted in one 
 or all of these qualities. But from what we know of 
 the history of warlike exterminating savage tribes 
 at the present day— as, for instance, the Masai of 
 East Africa — it seems unlikely that the method of 
 extermination — that is, of true natural selection — had 
 much effect in man's development after the very 
 earhest period. Union and absorption were more 
 usual results of the contact of primitive tribes than 
 struggles to the death. The expulsion of one group 
 by afiother from a desired territory was more usual 
 than the destruction of the conquered. In spite of 
 the frequent assertions to the contrary, it seems that 
 neither the more ancient wars of mankind for conquest 
 and migration nor the present and. future wars for 
 commercial privilege have any real equivalence to the 
 simple removal by death of the unfit and the survival 
 and reproduction of the fit, which we know as Natural 
 Selection*. 
 
 The standard raised by the rebel man is not that of 
 'fitness' to the conditions proffered by extra-human 
 nature, but is one of an ideal cornfort, prosperity, and 
 conscious joy in life— imposed by the will of man and 
 involving a control and in important respects a sub- 
 version of what were Nature's methods of dealing with 
 life before she had produced her insurgent son. The 
 progress of man in the acquirement of this control of 
 
24 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 Nature has been one of enormous rapidity within the 
 historical period, and within the last two centuries has 
 led on the one hand to immensely increased facilities in 
 the application of mechanical power, in locomotion, in 
 agriculture, and in endless arts and industries ; and on 
 the other hand to the mitigation of disease and pain. 
 The men whom we may designate as 'the Nature- 
 searchers ' — those who founded the New Philosophy of 
 the Invisible College at Oxford and the Royal. Society 
 in London — have placed boundless power in the hands 
 of mankind. 
 
 II. The Attainment by Man of the Know- 
 ledge OF HIS Relations to Nature. 
 
 But to many the greatest result achieved by the 
 progress of Natural Knowledge seems not to have been 
 so much in its practical applications and its material 
 gifts to humanity as in the fact that Man has arrived 
 through it at spiritual emancipation and freedom of 
 thought. 
 
 In the latter part of the last. century man's place ia 
 Nature became clearly marked out by the accumulation 
 of definite evidence. The significance and the im- 
 measurable importance of the knowledge of Nature to 
 philosophy and the highest regions of speculative thought 
 are expressed in the lines of one who most truly and 
 with keenest insight embodied in his imperishable verse 
 the wisdom and the aspirations of the Victorian age : — 
 
 ■'Flower in the crannied wall, 
 I pluck you out of the crannies : 
 I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
 
 Little flower but if 1 could understand 
 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is.' 
 
Nature and Man 25 
 
 To many the nearer approach to that ' understanding ' 
 has seemed the greatest and a sufficient result of 
 scientific researches. The recognition that such an 
 understanding leads to such vast knowledge would 
 seem to ensure further and combined effort to bring it 
 nearer and nearer to the complete form, even if the 
 perfect understanding of the 'all in all' be for ever 
 unattainable. Nevertheless, the clearer apprehension, 
 so recently attained, of man's origin, and destiny, and 
 of the enormous powers of which he has actually the 
 control, has not led to any very obvious change in 
 the attitude of responsible leaders of human activity in 
 the great civilized communities of the world. They 
 still attach little or no importance to the acquirement of 
 a knowledge of Nature: they remain fixed in the old 
 ruts of traditional ignorance, and obstinately turn their 
 faces towards the past, still believing that the teachings 
 and sayings of antiquity and the contemplation, not to 
 say the detailed enumeration, of the blunders and crimes 
 of its ancestors, can furnish mankind with the know- 
 ledge necessary for its future progress. The com- 
 parative failure of what may be called the speculative 
 triumph of the New Philosophy to produce immediate 
 practical consequences has even led some among those 
 prejudiced by custom and education in favour of the 
 exclusive employment of man's thought and ingenuity 
 in the delineation and imaginative resurrection of the 
 youthful follies and excesses of his race, to declare that the 
 knowledge of Nature is a failure, the New Philosophy 
 of the Nature-searchers a fraud. Thus the well-known 
 French publicist M. Brunettiere has taken upon himself 
 to declare what he calls the Bankruptcy of Science. 
 
26i The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 12. The Regnum Hominis. 
 
 As a matter of fact the pew knowledge of Nature — 
 the newly-ascertained capacity of man for a control of 
 Nature so thorough as to be almost unlimited — has not 
 as yet had an opportunity for showing what it can do. 
 A lull after victory, a lethargic contentment, has to some 
 extent followed on the crowning triumphs of the great 
 Nature-searchers whose days were numbered with the 
 closing years of that nineteenth century which through 
 them marks an epoch. No power has called on man to 
 arise and enter upon the possession of his kingdom — 
 the ' Regnum Hominis ' foreseen by Francis Bacon and 
 pictured by him to an admiring but incredulous age with 
 all the fervour and picturesque detail of which he was 
 capable. And yet at this moment the mechanical diffi- 
 culties, the want of assurance and of exact knowledge, 
 which necessarily prevented Bacon's schemes from 
 taking practical shape, have been removed. The will 
 to possess and administer this vast territory alone is 
 wanting. 
 
 13. Man's Destiny. 
 
 Within the last few years an attempt to spur the will 
 of Englishmen in this direction has been made by some 
 who have represented that this way lie great fortunes, 
 national ascendancy, imperial domination. The effort 
 has not met with much success. On the other hand, 
 I speak for those who would urge the conscious and 
 deliberate assumption of his kingdom by Man— not as 
 a matter of markets and of increased opportunity for 
 the cosmopolitan dealers in finance— but as an absolute 
 duty, the fulfilment of Man's destiny «, a necessity the 
 
Nature and Man 27 
 
 incidence of which can only be deferred and not 
 avoided. 
 
 This is, indeed, the definite purpose of my dis- 
 course : to point out that civilized man has proceeded 
 so far in his interference with extra-human nature, 
 has produced for himself and the living organisms 
 associated with him such a special state of things 
 by his rebellion against natural selection and his 
 defiance of Nature's pre-human dispositions, that he 
 must either go on and acquire firmer control of the 
 conditions or perish miserably by the vengeance 
 certain to fall on the half-hearted meddler in great 
 affairs. We may indeed compare civilized man to 
 a successful rebel against Nature who by every step 
 forward renders himself liable to greater and greater 
 penalties, and so cannot afford to pause or fail in 
 one single step. Or again we may think of him as 
 the heir to a vast and magnificent kingdom who has 
 been finally educated so as to fit him to take posses- 
 sion of his property, and is at length left alone to 
 do his best; he has wilfully abrogated, in many 
 important respects, the laws of his mother Nature 
 by which the kingdom was hitherto governed ; he 
 has gained some power and advantage by so 
 doing, but is threatened on every hand by dangers 
 and disasters hitherto restrained : no retreat is pos- 
 sible — his only hope is to control, as he knows that 
 he can, the sources of these dangers and disasters. 
 They already make him wince: how long will he sit 
 listening to the fairy-tales of his boyhood and shrink 
 from manhood's task? 
 
 A brief consideration of well-ascertained facts is 
 sufficient to show that Man, whilst emancipating him- 
 
28 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 self from the destructive methods of natural selection, 
 has accumulated a new series of dangers and difficul- 
 ties with which he must incessantly contend. 
 
 14. Man and Disease. 
 
 In the extra-human system of Nature there is no 
 disease and there is no conjunction of incompatible 
 forms of life, such as Man has brought about on the 
 surface of the globe. In extra-human Nature the 
 selection of the fittest necessarily eliminates those 
 diseased or liable to disease. Disease both of parasitic 
 and congenital origin occurs as a minor phenomenon. 
 The gongenitally diseased are destroyed before they 
 can reproduce: the attacks of parasites great and 
 small either serve only to carry off the congenitally 
 weak, and thus strengthen the race, or become harm- 
 less by the survival of those individuals which, 
 owing to peculiar qualities in their tissues, can 
 tolerate such attacks without injury, resulting in the 
 establishment of immune races. It is a remarkable 
 thing— which possibly may be less generally true than 
 our present knowledge seems to suggest— that . the 
 adjustment of organisms to their surroundings is so 
 severely complete in Nature apart from Man, that 
 diseases are unknown as constant and normal pheno- 
 mena under those conditions. It is no doubt difficult to 
 investigate this matter, since the presence of Man as 
 an observer itself implies human intervention. But 
 it seems to be a legitimate view that every disease 
 to which animals (and probably plants also) are liable, 
 excepting as a transient and very exceptional occur- 
 rence, is due to Man's interference. The diseases 
 of cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses, are not known 
 
Nature and Man 29 
 
 except in domesticated herds and those wild creatures 
 to which Man's domesticated productions have com- 
 municated them. The trypanosome lives in the blood 
 of wild game and of rats without producing mischief. 
 The hosts have become tolerant of the parasite. .It 
 is only when man brings his unselected, humanly- 
 nurtured races of cattle and horses into contact with 
 the parasite, that it is found to have deadly properties ''. 
 The various cattle-diseases which in Africa have done 
 so much harm to native cattle, and have in some 
 regions exterminated big game, have per contra 
 been introduced by man through his importation of 
 diseased animals of his own breeding from Europe. 
 Most, if not all, animals in extra-human conditions, 
 including the minuter things such as insects, shell- 
 fish, and invisible aquatic organisms, have been 
 brought into a condition of 'adjustment' to their 
 parasites as well as to the other conditions in which 
 they live: it is this most delicate and efficient 
 balance of Nature which Man everywhere upsets. 
 A solitary case of a ravaging epidemic constantly 
 recurring amongst animals living in extra-human con- 
 ditions, .one of a strangely interesting character, is 
 the phosphorescent disease of the sand-shrimps or 
 sand-hoppers. This is due to a microscopic parasite, 
 a bacterium, which infests the blood and is phosphor- 
 escent, so that the infected sand-hopper has at night 
 the brilliancy of a glow-worm. The disease is deadly, 
 and is common among the sand-hoppers dwelling in 
 the sandy flats of the north coast of France, where 
 it may readily be studied ^ It has not been recorded as 
 occurring in this country. It is not at all improbable 
 that this disease is also in truth one which only 
 
30 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 occurs in the trail of man. It is quite likely that 
 the artificial conditions of sewage and garbage set 
 up by man on the sea-coast are responsible for the 
 prevalence of this parasite, and the weakly receptivity 
 of the too-numerous sand-hoppers. 
 
 It is probable enough that, from time to time, under 
 the influence of certain changes of climate and asso- 
 ciated fauna and flora — due to meteoric or geologic 
 movements — parasitic disease has for a time ravaged 
 this or that species newly exposed to it ; but the final 
 result is one or other of the alternatives, extinction or 
 adjustment, death or toleration. The disease does not 
 establish itself as a scourge against which the diseased 
 organism incessantly contends. It either obliterates its 
 victim or settles down with it into relations of reciprocal 
 toleration. 
 
 Man does not admit this alternative either, for himself 
 or for the domesticated and cultivated organisms which 
 he protects. He 'treats' disease, he staves off 'the 
 adjustment by death,' and thus accumulates vast popula- 
 tions of unadjusted human beings, animals and plants, 
 which from time to time are ravaged by disease — 
 producing uncertainty and dismay in human society. 
 Within the past few years the knowledge of the- 
 causes of disease has become so far advanced that it 
 is a matter of practical certainty that, by the unstinted 
 application of known methods of investigation and 
 consequent controlling action, all epidemic' disease 
 could be abolished within a period so short as fifty 
 years. It is merely a question of the employment of 
 the means at our command. Where there is one 
 man of first-rate intelligence employed in detecting the 
 disease-producing parasites, their special conditions of 
 
Nature and Man 31 
 
 life and the way to bring them to an end, there should 
 be a thousand. It should be as much the purpose of 
 civilized governments to protect their citizens in this 
 respect as it is to provide defence against human 
 aggression. Yet it is the fact that this immensely 
 important control of a great and constant danger and 
 injury to mankind is left to the unorganized inquiries 
 of a few enthusiasts. So little is this matter understood 
 or appreciated, that those who are responsible for the 
 welfare of States, with the rarest exceptions, do not even 
 know that such protection is possible, and others again 
 are so far from an intelligent view as to its importailce, 
 that they actually entertain the opinion that it would be 
 a good thing were there more disease in order to get 
 rid of the weakly surplus population! 
 
 Six weeks ago I was enabled to examine in the 
 Pasteur Institute in Piaris, the minute spiral thread 
 which has just been discovered and shown to be the 
 cause of the most terrible and widely spread of human 
 diseases, destroying the health and strength of those 
 whom it does not kill and damaging the lives of their 
 children, so that it has been justly said that this malady 
 and the use of alcohol as a beverage are together 
 responsible for more than half the disease and early 
 death of the mature population of Europe. For more than 
 thirty years a few workers, here and there, have been 
 searching for this parasite and the means of suppress- 
 ing the awful curse of which it is the instrument. It 
 would have been discovered many years ago had 
 greater value been set on the inquiries which lead to 
 such discoveries by those who direct the public ex- 
 penditure of civilized States. And now the complete 
 suppression of this dire enemy of humanity is as plain 
 
32 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 and certain a piece of work to be at once accomplished 
 as is the building of an ironclad. But it will not be 
 done for many years because of the ignorance and 
 unbelief of those who alone can act for the com- 
 munity in such matters. The discovery — the presenta- 
 tion to the eye and to exploring manipulation — of that 
 well-nigh ultra-microscopic germ of death, seemed to 
 me, as I gazed at its delicate shape, a thing of greater 
 significance to mankind than the emendation of a Greek 
 text or the determination of the exact degree of turpitude 
 of the statesmen of a bygone age. 
 
 The knowledge of the causation of disease by bac- 
 terial and protozoic parasites is a thing which has 
 come into existence, under our very eyes and hands, 
 within the last fifty years. The parasite, and much of 
 its nature and history, has been discovered in the case 
 of splenic fever, leprosy, phthisis, diphtheria, typhoid 
 fever, glanders, cholera, plague, lock-jaw, gangrene, 
 septic poisoning (of wounds), puerperal fever, malaria; 
 sleeping sickness, and some other diseases which are 
 fatal to man. In some cases the knowledge obtained 
 has led to a control of the attack or of the poisonous 
 action of the parasite. Antiseptic surgery, by defeating 
 the poisonous parasite, has saved not only thousands 
 upon thousands of lives, but has removed an incal- 
 culable amount of pain. Control is slowly being ob- 
 tained in regard to several others among these deadly 
 microbes in various ways, most wonderful of which is 
 the development, under man's control, of serums con- 
 taining anti-toxins appropriate to each disease, which 
 have to be injected into the blood as the means of either 
 cure or protection. But why should we be content to 
 wait long years, even centuries, for this control, when 
 
Nature and Man 33 
 
 we can have it in a few years? If more men and abler 
 men were employed to study and experiment on this 
 matter, we should soon make an end of all infectious 
 disease. Is there any one, man or woman, who would 
 not wish to contribute to the removal from human life 
 of the suffering and uncertainty due to disease, the 
 anguish and miseiy caused by premature death ? Yet 
 nothing is done by those who determine the expendi« 
 ture of the revenues of great States towards dealing 
 adequately with this matter ^, 
 
 15. The Increase of Human Population. 
 
 Whilst there is a certainty of Man's power to remove 
 all disease from his life, a difficulty which he has already 
 created for himself will be thereby increased. That 
 difficulty is the increase of human population beyond 
 the capacity of the earth's surface to provide food and 
 the other necessities of life. By rebelling against 
 Nature's method, Man has made himself the only animal 
 which constantly increases in numbers. Whenever 
 disease is controlled his increase will be still more rapid- 
 than at present. At the same time no attempt at 
 present has ' been made by the more advanced com- 
 munities of civilized men to prevent the multiplication 
 of the weakly or of those liable to congenital disease. 
 Already something like a panic on this subject has 
 appeared in this country. Inquiries have been con- 
 ducted by public authorities. But the only possible 
 method of dealing with this matter, a*id in the first place 
 of estimating its importance as immediate or remote, 
 has not been applied. Man can only deal with this 
 difficulty created by his own departure from Nature— 
 to which he can never return— by thoroughly investi- 
 
34 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 gating the laws of breediilg and heredity, and proceeding 
 to apply a control to human multiplication based upon 
 certain and indisputable knowledge* It may be a cen- 
 tury, or it may be more than five centuries, before the 
 matter would, if let alone, force itself upon a desperate 
 humanity, brutalized by over-crowding and the struggle 
 for food. A return to Nature's terrible selection of 
 the fittest may, it is conceivable, be in this way in 
 store for us. But it is more probable that humanfty 
 will submit, before that condition occurs, to a restriction 
 by the community in respect of the right to multiply, 
 with as good a grace as it has given up the right to 
 murder and to steal. In view of this Man must, in 
 entering on his kingdom, at once proceed to perfect 
 those studies as to the transmission of qualities by 
 heredity which, have as yet been only roughly carried 
 out by breeders of animals and horticulturists. 
 
 There is absolutely no provision for this in any 
 civilized community, and no conception among the people 
 or their leaders that it is a matter which concerns any 
 one but farmers. 
 
 16. An Untouched Source of Energy. 
 
 The applications of steam and electricity have so for 
 astonished and gratified the rebel Man, that he is some- 
 times disposed to conclude that he has come to the end 
 of his powers in relieving himself from the use of his 
 own muscles for anything but refined movements and 
 well-considered health-giving exercises. One of the 
 greatest of chemical discoverers at this time living, 
 M. Betthebt, has, however, recently pressed on our 
 attention the question of the possibility of tapping the 
 central heat of the earth and making use Of it as a 
 
Nature and Man 35 
 
 pferennial source of energy. Many competent phyacists 
 have expressed the opinion that the mechanical diffi- 
 culties of such a boring as would be necessary are 
 insuperable. No one, however, would venture to pro» 
 phesy, in such a matter as this, that what is preVentfed 
 by insuperable obstacles to-day may not be within our 
 powers in the course of a few years. 
 
 17. Speculations as to the Martians. 
 
 Such audacious 'control of the resources of our planet 
 is suggested as a possibility, a legitimate hope and aim, 
 by recent observations and speculations as to our neigh* 
 bour, the planet Mars. I do not venture to express 
 any opinion as to the interpretation of the appearances 
 revealed by the telescope on the surface of the planet 
 Mars, and indeed would take the most sceptical attitude 
 until further information is obtained. But the influenced 
 of these statements about Mars on the imagination and 
 hope's of Man seems to me to possess considerable 
 interest. The markings on the surface of the planet 
 Mars, which have been interpreted as a system of 
 canals, have been known and discussed for many years. 
 It has recently been observed that these canals undergo 
 a recurrent seasonal change' of appearance consistent 
 with the hypothesis that they are periodically filled 
 with water, which is derived from the polar snow-caps 
 of the planet at the season of greatest polar heat. It 
 is suggested that Mars is inhabited by an intelligent 
 population, not Necessarily closely similar to mankind, 
 but, on the contrary, unUke mankind in proportion as 
 the conditions of Mars are unlike those of the Earth, 
 and that these inhabitants have constructed by their 
 own efforts the enormous irrigation works upon which 
 
 c 2 
 
36 The Romanes Lectuft 1905 
 
 thd'fertility and habitability of their planet, at the present 
 time, depend. These speculations lead M. Faguet of 
 the French Academy to further reflections. The Mar^ 
 tians who have carried out this vast manipulation of 
 a planet must be not only far in advance of the inhabi- 
 tants of the Earth in intelligence and mechanical power, 
 as a result of the greater age of their planet and the 
 longer continuance there of the evolution of an intelli- 
 gent race, but such a vast work and its maintenance 
 would seem to imply a complete unanimity among the 
 Martians, a world-wide peace and common government, 
 Since we can imagine such a result of the prolonged 
 play of forces in Mars, similar to those at work in our 
 own Earth, and even obtain some slight confirmation 
 of the supposition, may we not indulge in the surmise 
 that some such future is in store for Man, that he may 
 be able hereafter to deal with great planetary factors 
 to his own advantage, and not only draw heat from the 
 bowels of the earth for such purposes as are at present 
 within his scope, but even so as to regulate, at some 
 distant day, the climates of the earth's surface, and the 
 winds and the rain which seem now for ever beyond 
 his control ? 
 
 18. The Investigation of the Human Mind. 
 In such a desultory survey as that on which I have 
 ventured, of Man's kingdom and its dangers, it occurs 
 to me to mention another area upon which it seems 
 urgent that the activities of nature-searchers should be 
 immediately turned with increased power and number. 
 The experimental study of his body and of that of 
 animals has been carried far and with valuable results 
 by inquiring Man. But singularly small a:ttention has. 
 
Nature and Man 37 
 
 yet been ^ven to the investigation of Man's mind as 
 a natural phenomenon and one which can be better 
 understood to the immense advantage of the race. 
 
 The mind of Man— it matters not for my immediate 
 argument whether it be regarded as having arisen 
 Tiormally or abnormally from the mind of animals- 
 is obviously the one and all-powerful instrument with 
 which he has contended, and is destined hereafter to 
 •contend, against extra-human Nature. It is no less 
 important for him to know the quality, the capacity, 
 the mode of operation of this instrument, its beginnings 
 and its limitations, than it is for him to know the 
 minutest details of the workings of Nature. Just as 
 much in the one case as in the other, it is impossible for 
 him to trust to the imperfect analysis made by ancient 
 races of men and the traditions and fancies handed down 
 in old writings— produced by generations who had not 
 arrived at the method of investigation which we now can 
 apply. Experiment upon the mental processes of animals 
 and of Man is greatly needed. Only here and there has 
 an3^hing been done in this direction.. Most promising 
 results have been obtained by such observations as those 
 on hypnotism and on various diseased and abnormal 
 states of the brain. But the subject is so little explored 
 that wild and untested assertions as to the powers of the 
 ^ind are current and have given rise to strange beliefs, 
 accepted by many seriously-intentioned men and women. 
 We boldly operate upon the minds of children in, our 
 systems of education without really knowing what we are 
 doing. We blindly assume that the owners of certain 
 minds, traditionally trained in amusing elegancies, are 
 fit to govern their fellow men and administer vast 
 provinces ;.. we assume that the discovery and com- 
 
38 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 prdiension of Nature's processes must be the wwk 
 of very few and peculiar minds; that if we take 
 care of the body the mind will take care of itself. 
 We know really nothing of the heredity of mental 
 qualities, nor how to estimate their presence or absence 
 in the young so as to develop the mind to greatest advanr 
 tage. We know the pain and the penalty of muscular 
 fatigue, but we play with the brains of young and old 
 as though they were indestructible machinery. What 
 is called experimental psychology is only in its infancy, 
 but it is of urgent necessity that it should be systemati- 
 cally pursued by the application of public funds in order 
 that Man may know how to make the best use of his 
 only weapon in his struggle to control Nature., 
 
 19, Man's Delay: its Cause and Remedy. 
 
 Even the siigkt amd rapid review just given oi Man's 
 position,, face to face with Nature, enables us to see 
 what a tremendous step he has taken, what desperate 
 conditions he has created by the wonderful exercise of 
 his will ; how much he has done and can do to contrd 
 the order of Nature, and how urgent it is, beyond all 
 that words can say, for him to apply his whole strength 
 and capacity to gaining further control, so that he may 
 accomplish his destiny and escape from misery. 
 
 It is obvious enough that Man is,, at present^ doing 
 vexy little in this directioja ; so little thait one seeks fsx 
 an explanation of his apathy, his seeming para,lysis. 
 
 The explanation is that the masses of the people,, in 
 civilized as well as uncivilized countries, are not yet 
 aware of the situation. When knowledge on this matter 
 reaches, as it inevitably will in time, to the- general popu- 
 lation, it is certain that the democracy will demand that 
 
Nature and Man 39 
 
 those who expend the resources of the community, and 
 as government officials undertake the organization of 
 the defence and other great public services for the 
 common good, shall put into practice the power of 
 Nature-control which has been gained by mankind, and 
 shall exert every sinew to obtain more. To effect this, 
 the democracy will demand that those who carry on 
 public affairs shall not be persons solely acquainted 
 with the elegant fancies and stories of past ages, but 
 shall be trained in the acquisition of natural knowledge 
 and keenly active in the skilful application of Nature- 
 control to the development of the well-being of the 
 community. 
 
 It would not be necessary to wait for this pressure 
 from below were the well-to-do class— which in most 
 modem States exercises so large an influence both 
 in the actual administration of Governments and by 
 example — so situated as to be in any way aware of 
 the responsibilities which rest upon it. Traditional 
 education has, owing to causes which are not far to 
 seek, deprived the well-to-do class of a knowledge of, 
 and interest in, Man's relation to Nature, and of his 
 power ^nd necessity to control natural processes. 
 During the whole period of the growth of man's 
 knowledge of Nature — that is to say, ever since the 
 days of Bruno-— the education of the well-to-do has been 
 directed to the acquirement of entertaining information 
 and elegant accomplishments, whilst 'useful know- 
 ledge' has been despised and obtained, when considered 
 necessary, from lower-class 'workmen' at workmen's 
 wages. It is of course not to be overiooked that there 
 have been notable exceptions to this, but they have 
 been exceptions. Even at the present. day, in some 
 
40 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 civilized States, a body of clerks, without any pretence 
 to an education in the knowledge of Nature, headed by 
 gentlemen of title, equally ignorant, are entrusted with, 
 and handsomely paid and rewarded for, the superintenr 
 dence of the armies, the. navies, the agriculture, the 
 public works, the fisheries, and even the public educa- 
 tion of the State. When compelled to seek the 
 assistance of those who have been trained in the know- 
 ledge of Nature (for even in these States there are a few 
 such eccentric persons to be found), the oflficials demand 
 that such assistance shall be freely given to them with- 
 out pay, or else offer to buy the knowledge required at 
 the rate paid to a copjdng clerk. 
 
 This state of thijjgs is not one for which it is possible 
 to blame those who, in blissful ignorance, contentedly 
 perform what they consider to be their duty to their 
 country. There are, however, in many States institu- 
 tions, of vast influence in the education of the whole 
 community, known as Universitiies. In many countries 
 they as well as the schools are directly controlled by 
 the. State. In England, however, we are happy in 
 having free Universities, the older of which, though in 
 some important respects tied down by law, yet have the 
 power to determine almost absolutely, not only what 
 shall be studied within their own wallSi., but what shall 
 ,be studied in all the schools of the country frequented 
 by the children of the well<-to-do. 
 
 It is the pride of our ancient Universities that they 
 are largely, if not exclusively, frequented by young men 
 of the class who are going to take an active part in the 
 public affairs of the country— either as politicians and 
 statesmen, as governors of remote colonies, or as leaders 
 pf the great professions of the Church, the Law, and 
 
Nature and Man 41 
 
 Medicine. It would seem, then, that if these Universities 
 attached a greater, even a predominant, importance to 
 the studies which lead to the knowledge and control of 
 Nature, the schools would follow their example, and 
 that the governing class of the country would become 
 acquainted with the urgent need for more knowledge of 
 the kind, and for the immediate application in public 
 affairs of that knowledge which exists. 
 
 It would seem that in Great Britain^ at any rate, it 
 would not be necessary, were the Universities alive to 
 the situation, to await the pressure of democracy, but 
 that a better and more rapid mode of development 
 would obtain ; the influential and trusted leaders of the 
 community would set the example in seeking and using 
 for the good of the State the new knowledge of Nature. 
 The world has seen with admiration and astonishment 
 the entire people of Japan follow the example of its 
 governing class in the almost sudden adoption of the 
 knowledge and control of Nature as the purpose of 
 national education and the guide of State administration; 
 It is possible that in a less rapid and startling manner 
 our old Universities may, at no distant date, influence 
 the intellectual life of the more fortunate of our fellow 
 citizens, and consequently of the entire community. 
 The weariness which is so largely expressed at the 
 present day in regard to human effort— whether it be 
 in the field of politics, of literature, or of other art, or in 
 relation to the improvement of social organization and 
 the individual life— is possibly due to the fact that we 
 have exhausted the old sources of inspiration, and have 
 not yet learnt to believe in the new. The 'return to 
 Nature,' which is sometimes vaguely put forward as 
 a cure for the all-peryading ' taedium ' of this age, is 
 
42 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 perhaps an imperfect expression of the truth that it 
 is time for civilized man not to return to the ' state of 
 Nature,' but to abandon his retrospective attitude and to 
 take up whole-heartedly the Kingdom of Nature which 
 k is his destiny to rule. New hope, new life will, when 
 he does this, be infused into every line of human 
 activity: Art will acquire a new impulse, and politics 
 become real and interesting. To a community which 
 believes in the destiny of Man as the controller of 
 Nature, and has consciously entered upon its fulfilment, 
 there can be none of the weariness and even despair 
 vrhich comes from an exclusive worship of the past 
 There can only be encouragement in every victory 
 gained, hope and the realization of hope. Even in the 
 face of the overwhelming opposition and incredulity 
 which now unhappily have the upper hand, the believer 
 in the predestined triumph of Man over Nature can 
 exert himself to place a contribution, however small, 
 in the great edifice of Nature-knowledge, happy in the 
 conviction that his life has been worth living, has counted 
 to the good in the imperishable result. 
 
 30. The Influence of Oxford. 
 
 If I venture now to consider more specifically the 
 influence exa-cised by the University ai Oxford upon 
 the welfare of the State and of the human community 
 in generd, in view of the conclusions which have 
 been set forth in what has preceded, I beg to say that 
 I do so with the greatest respect to the opinions of 
 others who differ from me. When I say this I am 
 not using an empty formula. I mean that I believe 
 that there must be many here present who are fair- 
 minded and disinterested, and have given special 
 
Nature and Man 43 
 
 attention to the matter of which I wish to speak, and 
 who are yet very far fronj agreeing with me. I ask 
 them to consider what I have said, and what I have 
 further to say, in the same spirit as that in which 
 I approach them. 
 
 It seems to me-^and when I speak of myself I would 
 point out that I am presenting the opinions of a large 
 number of educated men, and that it will be better 
 for me to avoid an egotistical attitude — it seems to 
 us (I prefer to say) that the University of Oxford 
 by its present action in regard to the choice and 
 direction of subjects of study is exercising an injurious 
 influence upon the education of the country, and espe- 
 cially upon the education of those who will hereafter 
 occupy positions gf Influence, and will largely determine 
 both the action of the State and the education and 
 iopinions of those who will in turn succeed them. 
 The question has been recently raised as to whether 
 the acquirement of a certain elementary knowledge 
 of the Greek language should be required of all those 
 who desire to pursue their studies in this University, 
 and a.ccordingly whether the teaching of the elements 
 of this language should form a prominent feature in 
 the great schools of this, country.. It seems to us 
 that this is only part of a much larger question ; namely, 
 whether it is desirable to continue to make the study 
 pf two dead languages— and of the story of the deeds 
 of great men in the past — the main if not the exclusive 
 matter to which the minds of the youth of the well-to-do 
 class are directed by our schools and universities. We 
 have come to the conclusion that this form of education 
 is a mistaken and injurious one. We desire to make 
 the chief subject of education boAh in school and in 
 
44 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 college a knowledge of Nature as set forth in the 
 sciences which are spoken of as physics, chemistry, 
 geology, and biology. We think that all education" 
 should consist in the first place of this kind of know- 
 ledge, on account of its commanding importance both 
 to the individual and to the' community. We think 
 that every man of even a moderate amount of education 
 should have acquired a sufficient knowledge of these 
 subjects to enable him at any rate to appreciate their 
 value, and to take an interest in their progress and 
 application to human life. And we think further that 
 the ablest youths of the country should be encouraged 
 to proceed to the extreme limit of present knowledge 
 in one or other branch of this knowledge of Nature 
 so as to become makers of new knowledge, and the 
 possible discoverers of enduring improvements in man's 
 control of Nature. No one should be educated so 
 as to be ignorant of the importance of these things; 
 and it should not be possible for the greatest talent 
 and mental power to be diverted to other fields of 
 activity through the fact that the necessary education 
 and opportunity in the pursuit of the knowledge of 
 Nature are withheld. The strongest inducements 
 in the way of reward and consideration ought, we 
 beheve, to be placed before a young man in the 
 direction of Nature-knowledge rather than in the 
 direction of other and far less important subjects of 
 study. 
 
 In fact, we should wish to see the classical and 
 historical scheme of education entirely abandoned; 
 and its place taken by a scheme of education in the 
 knowledge of Nature. 
 
 At the same time let me hasten to say that few. 
 
Nature and\Man 45 
 
 if any of us— and certainly not he who now addresses 
 you— would wish to remove the acquirement of the 
 use of languages, the training in the knowledge and 
 perception of beauty in literary art, and the feeding 
 of the mind with the great stories of the past, from 
 ^ high and necessary position in every grade of 
 education. 
 
 It is a sad and apparently inevitable accompaniment 
 of all discussion of this matter that those who advocate 
 a great and leading position for the knowledge of 
 Nature in education are accused of desiring to abolish 
 all study of literature, history, and philosophy. This 
 is, in reality, so far from being the case that we 
 should most of us wish to see a serviceable , knowr- 
 ledge of foreign languages, and a real acquaintance 
 with the beauties of English and other literature, 
 substituted for the present unsuccessful efforts to 
 teach effectively either the language or literature of 
 the Greeks and Romans. 
 
 It should not be for one moment supposed that 
 those who attach the vast importance which we dor 
 to the knowledge of Nature imagine that Man's 
 spirit can be satisfied by exclusive occupation with 
 that knowledge. We know, as well as any, that Man 
 does not live by bread alone. Though the study of 
 Nature is fitted to develop great mental qualities — 
 perseverance, honesty, judgement, and initiative— we 
 do not suppose that it completes Man's mental equip- 
 ment. Though the knowledge of Nature calls upon, 
 excites, and gratifies the imagination to a degree and 
 in a way which is peculiar to itself, we do not suppose 
 that it furnishes the opportunity for all forms of 
 Rental activity. The great joys of Art, the delight^ 
 
46 The RofHanes Lecture 1905 
 
 and eftlertaiftftient to be derived from the romance 
 and history of human character, are not parts of it. 
 They must never be neglected. But are we not 
 justified in asserting that, for some two hundred years 
 or more, these 'entertainments' have been pursued 
 in the name of the highest education and study to 
 the exclusion of the far weightier and more necessary 
 knowledge of Nature? 'This should ye have done, 
 and yet not left the other Undone,' may justly be said 
 to those who have Conducted the education of our 
 higher schools and universities along the pleasant 
 lines of literature, and history, to the neglect of the 
 urgently-needed ' improvement of Natural Knowledge.' 
 Nero was probably a musician of taste and training, 
 and it was artistic and high-class music which he 
 played wliile Rome was burning; so too the studies 
 of the past carried on at Oxford have been charming 
 and full of beauty, whilst England has lain, and lies, 
 in mortal peril for lack of knowledge of Nature. 
 
 It seems to be beyond dispute that the study, firstly 
 of Latin, and much more recently of Greek, were 
 followed in this University and in grammar schools, 
 not as educational exercises in the use of language, 
 but as keys to unlock the Store-rooms— the books—- itt 
 vdiich the knowledge of the ancients was contained. 
 So long as these keys were needed, it was reasonable 
 enough that every well-educated man should spend 
 such time as was necessary in providing himself with 
 the key. But now that the store-rooms are empty- 
 now that their contents have been appropriated and 
 scattered far and wide— in all languages of civilization, 
 it seems to be merely an unreasoning continuation 
 of superannuated custom to. go on with the provision 
 
Nature and Man 47 
 
 of these keys. Such, however, is the force of habit 
 that it continues: new and ingenious reasons for the 
 practice are put forward, whilst its original object is 
 entirely forgotten. 
 
 In the first place, it has come to be regarded as 
 a mark of good breeding, and thus an end in itself, 
 for a man to have some first-hand acquaintance with 
 Latin and Greek authors, even when he knows no 
 other literature. It is a fe^ioh, like the wearing of a 
 court dress. This cannot be held to justify the employ- 
 ment of most of the time and energy of youth in its 
 acquirement. 
 
 A second reason which is now put forward for the 
 practice is that the effort and labour expended on the 
 provision of these keys — even though it is admitted 
 that they are useless— is a wonderful and incomparably 
 fine exercise of the mind, fitting it for all sorts of worki 
 A theory of education has been enunciated which fits 
 in with this defence of the continued attempt to compel 
 young men to acquire a knowledge, however imper- 
 fect, of the Latin and Greek languages. It is held 
 that what is called 'training the mind' is the chief, 
 if not the only proper, aim of education; and it is 
 declared that the continuation of the study of these 
 once useful, but now useless, keys — Latin and Greek--- 
 is an all-sufficient training. If this theory were in 
 accordance with the facts, the conclusion in favour of 
 ^ving a very high place to the study so recommended 
 would be inevitable. But the facts do not support 
 this theory. Clever youths are taken and pressed 
 into the study of Greek and Latin, and we are asked 
 to conclude that their cleverness is due to these studies. 
 On the other hand, we maintain that though the study 
 
48 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 of grammar may be, when properly carried out, a 
 valuable exercise, yet that it is easily converted into 
 a worthless one, and can never in any ease take the 
 place of various other forms of mental training, such 
 as the observation of natural objects, the following out 
 of experimental demonstration of the qualities and 
 relations of natural bodies, and the devising and 
 execution of experiment as the test of hj^jothesis. 
 . Apart from 'training' there is the need for providing 
 the mind with information as well as method. The 
 knowledge of Nature is eagerly assimilated by young 
 people, and no training in mental gymnastics can be 
 a substitute for it or an excuse for depriving the young 
 of what is of inestimable value and instinctively desired. 
 The prominence which is assigned to a familiarity 
 with the details of history, more especially of what may 
 be called biographical history, in the educational system 
 favoured by Oxford, seems to depend on tlie same 
 causes as those which have led to the maintenance of 
 the study of Greek and Latin. To read history is a 
 pleasant occupation which has become a habit and 
 tradition. At one time men believed that history repeats 
 itself, and it was thought to be a proper and useful 
 training for one who would take part in public affairs 
 to store his mind with precedents and picturesque 
 narratives of prominent statesmen and rulers in far-off" 
 days and distant lands. As a matter of fact it. cannot 
 be shown that any statesman, or even the humblest 
 politician, has ever been guided to useful action by such 
 knowledge. History does not repeat itself, and the man 
 who thinks that it does will be led by his fragmentary 
 knowledge of stories of the past into serious blunders. 
 T.p the fashionable journalist such biographical history' 
 
Nature and Man 49 
 
 furnishes the seasoning for his essays on political ques- 
 tions of the day. But this does not seem to be a sufficient 
 reason for assigning so prominent a place in University 
 studies to this kind of history as is at present the case. 
 [The reason, perhaps, of the favour which it receives, is 
 that it is one of the few subjects which a man of purely 
 classical education can pursue without commencing his 
 education in elementary matters afresh. 
 
 It would be a serious mistake to suppose that those 
 who would give a complete supremacy to the study of 
 Nature, in our educational system, do not value and 
 enjoy biographical history for what it is worth as an 
 entertainment; or further, that they do not set great 
 value upon the scientific study of the history of the 
 struggles of the races and nations of mankind, as a por- 
 tion of the knowledge of the evolution of Man, capable 
 of giving conclusions of great value when it has been 
 further and more thoroughly treated as a department of 
 Anthropology. What seems to us undesirable is, that 
 mere stories and bald records of certain peoples should 
 be put forward as matter with which the minds of 
 children and young men are to be occupied, to the 
 exclusion of the all-important matters comprised in the 
 knowledge of Nature. 
 
 There are, it is well known, not a few who regard the 
 present institution of Latin and Greek and so-called 
 History, in the pre-eminent place which they occupy in 
 Oxford and the great schools of the country, as some- 
 thing of so ancient and fundamental a character that 
 to question the wisdom of that institution seems an 
 odious proceeding, partaking of the nature of blasphemy. 
 This state of mind takes its origin in a common error, 
 due to the fact that a straightforward account of the 
 
50 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 studies pursued in the University during the last five 
 hundred years has never been written. Our present 
 curriculum is a mere mushroom growth of the last 
 century, and has no claim whatever to veneration. 
 Greek was studied by but a dozen or two specialists 
 in Oxford two hundred and fifty years ago. In those 
 days, in proportion to what had been ascertained in 
 that subject and could be taught, there was a great 
 and general interest in the University in the know- 
 ledge of Nature, such as we should gladly see re- 
 vived at the present day. As a matter of fact, it is 
 only within the last hundred years that the dogma 
 of compulsory Greek, and the value of what is now 
 called a classical education, has been promulgated. 
 These things are not historically of ancient date ; they 
 are not essentials of Oxford. We are therefore well 
 within our right in questioning . the wisdom of their 
 continuance in so favoured a position, and we are 
 warranted in expressing the hope that those who can 
 change the policy of the University and Colleges in 
 this matter will, at no distant day, do so. 
 
 It is sometimes urged that Oxford should contentedly 
 resign herself to the overwhelming predominance given 
 to the study of ancient elegance and historic wisdom 
 within her walls. It is said that she may well be 
 I'eserved for these delightful pursuits, whilst newer- 
 institutions should do the hard work of aiding man 
 in his conquest of Nature. At first sight such a pro- 
 posal has a tempting character : we at-e charmed with 
 the 'Suggestion that our beautiful Oxford should be 
 enclosed by a ring fence and cut oiF for ever from the 
 contamination of the world. But a few moments reflec- 
 tion must convince most of us that such a treatment of 
 
Nature and Man 51 
 
 Oxford is 2^ insult to her and an impossibility, Oxford 
 is not dead. Only a few decades have passed — a mere 
 fraction of her lifetime — since she was free from the 
 oppression of grammar-school studies, arid sent forth 
 Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren to establish the 
 New Philosophy of the Invisible College in London. 
 She seems, to some of us, to have been used not qyite 
 wisely, perhaps not quite fairly, in the brief period which 
 has elapseid since that time. Why should she not shake 
 herself free again, and give, hereafter, most, if not the 
 whole, of her wealth and strength to the urgent work 
 which is actually pursued in every other University 
 of the world as a chief aim and duty ? 
 
 The fact that Oxford attracts the youth of the country 
 to her, and so determines the education offered in the 
 great schools; is a sufficient answer to those" who wish 
 to perpetuate the present employment of her resources 
 in the subvention and encouragement of comparatively 
 unimportant, though fascinating (even too fascinating), 
 studies, to the neglect of the pressing necessary know- 
 ledge of Nature. Those who enjoy great influence in 
 the affairs of the University tell us with pride that 
 Oxford not only determines what our best schools shall 
 teach, but has, as a main pre-occupation, the education 
 of statesmen, pro-consuls, leaders of the learned profes- 
 sions, and membefs of parliament ! Undoubtedly this 
 claim is well-founded, and its truth is the reason why 
 we cannot be content with. the maintenance by the 
 University of the compulsory study of Greek and Latin, 
 and the neglect to make the study of Nature an integral 
 and predominant part of every man's education. 
 
 To return to my original contention— the knowledge 
 and control of Nature is Man's destiny and his greatest 
 
 D 2 
 
52 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 heed . To enable future leaders of the cbmmuhity to 
 comprehend this, to perceive what the knowledge and 
 control of Nature are, and what are the steps by which 
 they are gained arid increased, is the duty of a great 
 University., To neglect this is to retard the approach 
 of well-being and happiness, and to injure humanity. 
 
 I beg, finally, fof toleration from those who do not 
 share my opinions. I am well aware that they are open 
 to the objection that they partake more of the nature of 
 dreams of the future than of practical proposals ^^. That,, 
 perhaps, may be accepted as my excuse for indulging 
 in them on such an occasion as the present. There 
 are, and always have been, dreamers in Oxford, and 
 beautiful dreams they have dreamed — some of the past, 
 and some of the future. The most fascinating dreams 
 are not, unfortunately, always realized ; but it is some- 
 times worth while to tell one's dream, for that may 
 Jsring it a step nearer to 'coming true.' 
 
NOTES 
 
 NOTE I (p. 8). 
 
 The foundation of the Royal Society of London is njost 
 intimately connected with the University of Oxford. Dr. 
 Wallis, an original member, writes : — ' I take its first ground 
 and foundation to have been in L,ondon about the year 1645, 
 when Dr. Wilkin^ ^nd others met weekly at a certain day 
 and hour. . . . About the year 1648-9 some of our company 
 were removed to Oxford; first Dr. Wilkins, then I, and soon 
 after Dr. Godd&rd, Those in Lopdon qontinued to meet 
 there as before (and we with them, whgn we had occasion 
 to be there), and those of us at Oxford ; with Dr. Ward 
 (since Bishop of Salisbury), Dr. Ralph Bathurst (now 
 President of Trinity College in Oxford), Dr. P?tty (since 
 Sir William Petty), Dr. Willis (then an eminent physician 
 in Oxford), ^nd divers others, continued such meetings in 
 Oxford, and brought those studies into fashion there; 
 meeting first at Dr. Petty's lodgings (in an apothecarie's 
 house) because of the convenience of inspecting drugs and 
 the like, as there was occasion; and after his remove to 
 Ireland (though not so constantly) at the lodgings of Dr. 
 Wilkins, then Warden of Wadham College, and after his 
 removal to Trinity College in Cambridge, at the lodgings 
 of the Honourable Mr. Robert Boyle, then resident for 
 divers years in Oxford, . , . In the meanwhile our company 
 at Greshara College being mvdi again increased by the 
 accession of divers, eminent and noble persons, upon his 
 Majesty's return, we were (about the beginning of the year 
 1662) by his Majesty's grace apd favour incorporated by the 
 name of the Royal Society.' 
 
54 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 NOTE 2 (p. 12). 
 
 There is a tendency among writers on Variation, as 
 affording the opportunity for the operation of Natural Selec- 
 tion, to assume that the variations presented by organisms 
 are minute variations in every direction around a central 
 point. Those observers who have done useful work in 
 showing the definite and limited character of organic varia- 
 tions have very generally assumed that they are opposing 
 a commonly held opinion that variation is of this equally 
 distributed character. I cannot find that Mr. Darwin made 
 any such assumption ; and it is certain, and must on reflec- 
 tion have been recognized by all naturalists, that the variations 
 by the selection and intensification of which natural selection 
 has produced distinct forms or speties, and in the course of 
 time altogether new groups of plants and animals, are 
 strictly limited to definite lines rendered possible, and alone 
 possible, by the constitution of the living matter of the 
 parental organism. We have no reason to suppose that 
 the offspring of a beetle could in the course of any number 
 of generations present variations on which selection could 
 operate so as to eventually produce a mammalian vertebrate ; 
 or that, in fact, the general result of the process of selec- 
 tion of favourable variations in the past has not been ab 
 initio limited by the definite and restricted possibilities 
 characteristic of the living substance of the parental organisms 
 of each divergent line or branch of the pedigree. 
 
 NOTE 3 (p. 14). 
 
 M. Paul Bourget of the Acad^mie Fran9aise is not only 
 a charming writer of modern 'novels,' but claims to be 
 a • psychologist,' a title which perhaps may be conceded to 
 every author who writes of human character. His works 
 are so deservedly esteemed, and his erudition is, as a rule, so 
 unassailable, that in selecting him as an example of the 
 frequent misrepresentation, among literary men, of Darwin's 
 doctrine, I trust that my choice may be regarded as a 
 testimony of my admiration for his art. In his novel Un 
 
Notes 55 
 
 Divorce, published in 1904, M. Bourget says: 'La lutte 
 entre les especes, cette inflexible loi de I'univers animal, 
 a sa correspondance exacte dans le monde des iddes. 
 Certaines mentalitds constituent de v6ritables especes intel- 
 lectuelles qui ne peuvent pas durer a c6td les unes des 
 autres' (Edition Plon, p. 317). This inflexible law of the 
 animal universe, the struggle between species, is one which 
 ■ is quite unknown to zoologists. The ' struggle for existence,' 
 to which Darwin assigned importance, is not a struggle 
 between different species, but ■ one between closely similar 
 members of the same species. The struggle between species 
 is by no means universal, but in fact very rare. The preying 
 of one species on another is a moderated affair of balance 
 and adjustment which may be described rather as an accom-" 
 modation than as a struggle. 
 
 A more objectionable misinterpretation of the naturalists' 
 doctrine of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for 
 existence is that made by journalists and literary politicians, 
 who declare, according to their political bias, either that 
 science rightly teaches that the gross quality measured by 
 wealth and strength alone can survive and should there- 
 fore alone be cultivated, or that science (and especially, 
 Darwinism) has done serious injury to the progress of 
 mankind by authorizing this teaching. Both are wrong, 
 and owe their error to self-satisfied flippancy and traditional 
 ignorance in regard to nature-knowledge and the teaching 
 of Darwin. The 'fittest' does not mean the 'strongest.' 
 The causes of survival under Natural Selection are very 
 far indeed from being rightly described as mere strength, 
 nor are they baldly similar to the power of accumulating 
 wealth. Frequently in Nature the more obscure and feeble 
 survive in the struggle because of their modesty and suitability 
 to given conditions, whilst the rich are sent empty away and 
 the mighty perish by hunger. 
 
 NOTE 4 (p. 20). 
 
 A short discussion of this subject and the introduction of 
 the term ■ educability ' was .published in a paper by me, 
 
$6 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 entitled 'The Significance of the Increased Size of the 
 Cerebrum in recent as compared with extinct Mammalia,' 
 Ginquantenaire de la Soci6t6 de Biologie, Paris, 1899, 
 pp. 48-51. 
 
 It has been pointed out to me by my friend Dr. Andrews, 
 of the Geological Department of the British Museum, that 
 the brain cavity of the elephants was already of relatively 
 large size in the Eocene members of that group, which 
 may be connected with its persistence through subsequent 
 geological periods. 
 
 NOTE 5 (p. 23). 
 It would be an error to maintain that the process of 
 Natural Sel^tion is entirely in abeyance in regard to Man. 
 In an interesting book. The Present Evolution of Man, 
 Mr. Archdall Reid has shown tliat in regard to zymotic 
 diseases, and also in regard to the use of dangerous drugs 
 such as alcohol and opium, there is first of all the acquire- 
 ment of immunity by powerful races of men through the 
 survival among them of those strains tolerant of the disease 
 or of the drug, and secondly, the introduction of those diseases 
 and drugs by the powerful immune race, in its migrations, to 
 races not previously exposed either to the diseases or the 
 drugs, and a consequent destruction of the invaded race. 
 The survival of the fittest is, in these cases, a survival of 
 the tolerant and eventually of the immune. 
 
 NOTE 6 (p. 26). 
 
 'Religion means the knowledge of our destiny and of 
 the means of fulfilling it.' — Life and Letters of Mandell 
 Creighton, sometime Bishop of London, vol, ii. p. 195. 
 
 NOTE 7 (p. 29). 
 
 This has been established in the case of the Typanpsoma 
 Brucei, a minute parasite living in the blood of big game in 
 South -East Africa, amongst which it is disseminated by 
 ,^ blood-sucking fly, the Ghssina morsitans or Tsetze fly 
 
Notes^ 57 
 
 The parasite appears to do little or no harm to the native big 
 game, but causes a deadly disease both in the horses and 
 cattle introduced by Europeans and in the more anciently 
 introduced native cattle (of Indian origin). Similar cases are 
 found where a disease germ (such as that of measles) produces 
 but a small degree of sickness and mortality in a population 
 long associated with it, but is deadly to a human community 
 to which it is a new-comer. Thus Europeans have introduced 
 measles with deadly results into the South Sea Islands. 
 A similar kind of difHculty, of which many might be cited, 
 is brought about by man's importations and exportations of 
 useful plants. He thus brought the Phylloxera to Europe, 
 not realizing beforehand that this little parasitic bug, though 
 harmless to the American vine which puts out new shoots on 
 its roots when the insect injures the old ones, is absolutely 
 deadly to the European vine, which has not acquired the 
 simple but all-important mode of growth by which the 
 JVmerican vine is rendered safe. Thus too he took the coffee- 
 plant to Ceylon, and found his plantations suddenly devastated 
 by a minute mould, the HemUeia vastatrix, which had lived 
 very innocently before that in the Cingalese forests, but was 
 ready to burst into rapacious and destructive activity when 
 the new unadjusted coffee-trees were imported by man and 
 presented in carefully crowded plantations to its unrestrained 
 infection. 
 
 NOTE 8 (p. 2g). 
 
 The phosphorescent disease of the sand-hopper [Talitrus) 
 is described by Giard and Billet in a paper entitled 'Observa^ 
 tions sur la maladie phosphorescente des Talitres et autres 
 Crustiacds,' in the memoirs of the Society de Biologic, Oct. 19, 
 1889. 
 
 Billet subsequently gave a further account of this organism, 
 and named it Bacillus Gtardi—a&er Professor Giard of Paris. 
 (Bulletins scientifiques de la France et de la Belgique, xxi, 
 
 1898, p. 144.) . J r 
 
 It appears that the parasite is transmitted Irom one in- 
 dividual to another in coition. The specimens studied by 
 
58 The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 Giard and Billet were obtained at Wimereux near Boulogne. 
 I found the disease very abundant at Ouistrehara near Caen 
 in the summer of 1900. I have not observed it nor heard of 
 its occurrence on the English coast. Sea-water commonly 
 contains a free-living phosphorescent bacterium which can be 
 cultivated in flasks of liquid food so as to give rich growths 
 which glow like a lamp when the flask is agitated so as to 
 expose the contents to oxidation. This bacterium is not, 
 however, the cause of the ' phosphorescence ' of the sea often 
 seen on our coasts. That is due in most cases to a much 
 larger organism, as big as a small pin's head, and known as 
 NocHluca miliaris. 
 
 NOTE 9 (p. 33). 
 
 As little is the question of the use and abuse of food and 
 drink dealt with, as yet, by civilized man. As in many other 
 matters man has carried into his later crowded, artificial, 
 nature-controlling life habits and tendencies derived from 
 savage prehistoric days, so has he perpetuated ways of 
 feeding which are mere traditions from his early ' animal * 
 days and have never been seriously called in question and 
 put to proof. The persistence under new conditions of either 
 habit or structure which belonged to old conditions may be 
 attended with great danger and difliculty to an organism 
 which changes, as man does, with great rapidity important 
 features in its general surroundings and mode of life. This 
 is in effect Metschnikoff's doctrine of ! disharmonies.' It 
 is probable that in very early days when a tribe of primitive 
 men killed a mammoth, they all rushed on to the dead 
 monster and gorged as much of its flesh as they could swallow 
 (cooked or possibly uncooked). They had to take in enough 
 to last for another week or two — that is to say, until another 
 large animal should be trapped and slain. Accordingly he 
 who could eat most would be strongest and best jable to 
 seize a good share when the next opportunity arrived, and it 
 naturally became considered an indication of strength, vigour, 
 and future prosperity to be capable of gorging large quantities 
 
Notes 59 
 
 of food. By means of the phrases 'enjoying a good appetite,' or 
 • a good trencherman,' or other such approving terms, civilized 
 society still encourages the heavy feeder. The lower classes 
 always consider a ravenous appetite to be an indication of 
 strength and future prosperity in a child. Most healthy men, 
 and even many women, in Western Europe attack their food 
 and swallow it without sufBcient mastication, and as though 
 they did not hope to get another chance of feeding for a week 
 or two to come. Medical men have never ventured to in- 
 vestigate seriously whether civilized man is doing best for 
 his health in behaving like a savage about his food. It is 
 their business to attend to the patient with a disordered 
 digestion, but not to experiment upon the amount of food of 
 various kinds which" the modern man should swallow in 
 order to avoid indigestion and yet supply his alimentary 
 needs. No individual can possibly pay medical men to make 
 these observations. It is the business of the state to do so, 
 because such knowledge is not only iteeded by the private 
 citizen, but is of enormous importance in the management 
 of armies and navies, in the victualling of hospitals, asylums^ 
 and prisons. Thousands of tons of preserved meat have 
 been wasted in recent wars because the reckless and ignorant 
 persons who purchased the preserved meat to feed soldiers 
 had never taken the trouble to ascertain whether preserved 
 meat, can be eaten by a body of men as a regular and chief 
 article of diet. It appears that certain methods of preserving 
 meat render it innutritious and impossible as a diet. 
 
 It is probable from recent experiment that we all, except 
 those unfortunate few who do not get enough, eat about twice 
 as much as we require, and that the superfluous quantity 
 swallowed not only is wasted, but is actually a cause of 
 serious illness and suffering. It surely is an urgent matter 
 that these questions about food should be thoroughly in- 
 vestigated and settled. In the opinion of the most eminent 
 physiologist of the United States (Professor Bowditch), we 
 shall never establish a rational and healthy mode of feeding 
 ourselves until we give up the barbarous but to some persons 
 
6a The Romanes Lecture 1905 
 
 pleasant custom of converting the meal into a social function j 
 we are thus tempted into excess. Only long and extensive 
 experiment can provide us with definite and conclusive in- 
 formation on this matter, which is far more important than, 
 at first sight, it seems to be. And similarly with regard to 
 the admittedly serious question of alcohol — only very ex- 
 tensive and authoritative experiment will suffice to show 
 mankind whether it is a wise and healthy thing to take it in 
 small quantities, the exact limits of which must be stated, or 
 to reject it altogether. 
 
 NOTE 10 (p. 44). 
 
 It is, perhaps, needful to point out that what is aimed at 
 IS that the education of all the youth of the country, both of 
 pass-men and of class-men, of girls as well as of boys, of the 
 rich as well as of the poor, should be primarily directed to 
 imparting an acquaintance with what we already possess in 
 respect of knowledge of Nature, and the training of the pupil 
 so as to enable him or her (a) to make use of that knowledge, 
 and (6) to take part in gaining new knowledge of Nature, at 
 this moment needed but non-existent. This does not involve 
 the complete exclusion of other subjects of instruction, to 
 which about one-third of the time and effort of school and 
 college life might be devoted. 
 
 NOTE ir (p. 52). 
 
 The practical steps which would correspond to the views 
 enunciated in this discourse are two. First, the formation 
 of an educational association to establish one or more schools 
 and colleges in which nature-knowledge and training in 
 nature-searching should be the chief matters to which atten- 
 tion would be given, whilst reasonable methods would also 
 be employed for implanting in the minds of the students 
 a love and understanding of literature and other forms of 
 art. Those who desired such an education for their children 
 would support these schools and colleges, just as in the 
 days of Anglican, exclusiveness the Nonconformists and 
 
Notes 6i 
 
 Roman Catholics supported independent educational institu- 
 tions. The second practical step would be the formation of 
 a political union which would make due respect to efficiency, 
 that is to say, to a knowledge of Nature, a test question in 
 all political contests. No candidate for Parliament would 
 receive the votes of the union unless he were either himself 
 educated in a knowledge of Nature or promised his support 
 exclusively to ministers who would insist on the utilization 
 of nature-knowledge in the administration of the great 
 departments of State, and would take active measures of 
 a financial character to develop with far greater rapidity and 
 certainty than is at present the case, that inquiry into and 
 control of Nature which is the indispensable factor in human 
 ■ welfare and progress. Such a programme will, I hope, at no 
 distant date obtain the support of a sufficient number of 
 parliamentary voters to raise political questions of a more 
 genuine and interesting character than those which many 
 find so tedious at the present momenta 
 
OXFORD 
 
 PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 
 BV HORACE HART, M.A. 
 
 FRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 BD 435.L28 
 
 Nature and man, 
 
 3 1924 009 162 359 
 
't' 
 
 *