Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/414

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
410
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

In fact, it seems as if Darwin and Wallace, Nageli, Haeckel, Dohrn, Weismann, De Vries and a host of other investigators, had grappled with an all-embracing problem—a problem of problems that must engage the best energies of all the sciences for centuries yet to come.[1]

It is a striking evidence of the slight degree to which our subjects have been developed that we are so often blind to the general implications of our work, and the need for help from every conceivable quarter was never greater than now. The opportunity to acknowledge the influence of the great group of English biologists—Darwin, Huxley and Wallace, who showed that evolution of some kind and through some agency was a fact—upon my own line of work in an apparently distantly related field is a particularly grateful one. And it is more in the hope of directing attention to the tremendous breadth of the problem than of emphasizing any particular views of my own that this article is written. And if what I say may direct the attention of any other worker, in an apparently far removed and exceedingly specialized line, to what he may have to offer on the great problem of evolution in general, it will be well.

  1. Whitman, Bulletin of the Wisconsin Natural History Society, New Series, 1907, V., p. 6.