BIOBIO 33 BIOLOGY BIOBIO (byo-byo), the largest river of Chile, has a W. N. W. course of about 200 miles, from near the volcano of An- tuco in the Andes to Concepcion on the Pacific Ocean. It is 2 miles wide at its mouth, and navigable for 100 miles. The river, since 1875, has given name to a province with an area of 5,245 square miles, and a pop. over 100,000. BIOGENESIS, in biology, a word in- vented by Professor Huxley, and first used by him in his address, as President of the British Association, at Liverpool, 1870, to indicate the view that living matter can be produced only from that which is itself living. It is opposed to abiogenesis. The first who established the doctrine of biogenesis was Francesco Redi. He considered that there were two kinds of it; the first, and by far the most common, that in which the offspring passes through the same series of changes as the parent, and the second, that m which the offspring is altogether and permanently unlike the parent. The former is now called homogenesis and the latter xenogenesis. BIOGBAPHY, that department of lit- erature which treats of the individual lives of men or women; and also, a pros© narrative detailing the history and un- folding the character of an individual written by another. When written by the individual whose history is told it is called an autobiography. Though the term biography is modern, the kind of literature which it describes is ancient. In the Book of Genesis there are biographies, or at least memoirs of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and others. Homer's "Odyssey" may be considered to be an extended biog- raphy of Ulysses, limited, however, to the most interesting period of his life, that of his wanderings. The most elab- orate Greek biography was Plutarch's "Parallel Lives" ("Bioi Paralleloi") , con- sisting of 46 memoirs of Greek, Roman, and other celebrities; it was published about A. D. 80. Modern biographical literature may be considered to date from the 17th century, since which time individual biographies have multiplied enormously. Diction- aries of biography have proved extremely useful, Moreri's "Historical and Critical Dictionary" ^1671), being, perhaps, the first of this class. During the 19th cen- tury the most ambitious biographical work to be attempted was Leslie Ste- phen's "Dictionary of National Biogra- phy" (completed in about 60 volumes, the first of which appeared in January, 1885). There followed Appleton's "Cy- clopaedia of American Biogrraphy" (7 vols., 1887-1900); White's "National Cy- clopasdia of American Biography" (New York); "Men and Women of the Time" (London); Vapereau's "Universal Dic- tionary of Contemporaries" (Paris); "Lamb's Biographical Dictionary of the United States" (8 vols., 1897, et seq.); and "Canadian Men and Women of the Time." Other biographical works of ref- erence are "Who's Who" (English); "Who's Who in America" (latest edition 1920), and similar volumes for other countries, and for different classes and professions. Among works of more lim- ited aim may be noted various "Lives of the Saints," Fox's "Book of Martyrs," various "Lives of the Poets," Boswell's "Life of Johnson," etc. BIOLOGY. The biological sciences are those which deal with the phenomena of living things. They cover an enor- mous field of scientific activity and as a whole are j^retty clearly separated from the abiological sciences. Interest in bi- ology leading to greater knowledge has vastly increased in the last fifty years, has led to numerous subdivisions of the science, and has made it impossible for a single mind to so completely grasp the entire subject as did Huxley. For this reason the single subject is now rarely recognized as a university department and courses of instruction which are de- signed to give the student some general but accurate knowledge of the forms and activities of living things have not a prominent place in curricula. This is unfortunate, for environment brings man in contact with objects for biolog- ical study and whatever his main in- terest in life, he cannot neglect the in- fluence of biological science upon that interest. Subjects such as psycholog:y, sociology, and history are not generally considered as belonging to biology, but they really do; psychology being closely related to physiology, the phases of soci- ology exhibited by beings other than man are closely interlinked with those exhibited by man, and history broadly considered is but the influence of envi- ronmental conditions upon man. Biolog- ical science, though holding a place of its own, has close relation with abiolog- ical science which is recognized in phys- ics and chemistry by the creation of departments of biophysics and biochem- istry. The relation between physics and chemistry is accentuated in the physics and chemistry underlying and control- ling the activities of living things, certain chemical and physical arrange- ments of matter being found almost ex- clusively in living matter. The methods of biological science are the same as in all other science, experiment holds the
