Excerpt from Zoology Lecture Delivered at Columbia University in the Series on Science, Philosophy and Art, December 11

Zoology is the science that deals with the structure, de velopment and inter-relationships of animals, with the workings of their parts, their activities and their relations to their environment, and with the factors that determine their forms. We may recognize two great divisions of the subject, which are concerned respectively with static and with dynamic principles, though the materials of both divisions are the same - namely, all animals throughout the entire range from the highest to the lowest. It is of course clear that morphology - the science of structure - cannot be absolutely separated from physiology - the science of function in its widest sense - f or we do not know of organic structures that play absolutely no part in an animal'seconomy, even though this may be a relatively passive one; while on the other hand we do not know - in science at any rate - of a function that'is devoid of a material basis. The division is made solely for the sake of analysis, and it de pends entirely upon the point of view. Morphology treats adult animals, their different developmental stages, and, more naturally, the remains of extinct animals as though they were arrested in their living, but the dynamic aspects of organic life are so prominent and insistent that it is really impossible to ignore them even temporarily.

Besides dealing with the same materials, the many com plicated problems of zoology are still further connected in that the central object of study for both the structural and physiological divisions is evolution. As we look back over the history of the subject from our modern vantage ground, we can see how zoology began with ancient and mediaeval natural history, how from this parent stock arose the additional separate branches of anatomy, embryology, paleontology and distribution, how human physiology be came comparative physiology which developed later into the broad and deep enquiry into all the activities of ani mals, their vital relations to one another, and their reac tions to and upon the environment; and we can see how all these several branches were vitalized by the great prin ciple of evolution. This whole history shows a steady progress through one phase after another toward the mod ern study of evolution, though the naturalists of the eighteenth and even of much of the nineteenth century were unconscious, in whole or in part, of the way their oh servations and views were contributing to the establish ment of the doctrine of descent and to the partial descrip tion that can now be offered of the natural factors of evolution. As we shall see, the structural analysis of ani mals demonstrates the evolution of species as a universal process, while the broad study of the dynamic relations ofanimals is concerned with the causes of this process, as what we may venture to call the physiology of evolution. In brief, then, the great questions of zoology are the what and the how of evolution.

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