is available. Ordinary biological observation and description has as its unit the individual, or some part of the individual. It describes the individual in terms of its qualities or attributes. If an adequate description of the individual is given it does not concern itself solely with the separate parts, but discusses the qualities and attributes of the individual as a whole. Thus it would not be an adequate description of a man to say that he was the sum of such and such bones, muscles, nerves and blood vessels. A cat possesses much the same bones, muscles, nerves and blood vessels that a man has. It is probably no exaggeration to say that the similarity between men and cats in respect to these organ systems is so great that a person without previous experience of either — say a Martian — unless he were deeply versed in anatomy, might very possibly consider cats to be dwarf men if he had as a basis of distinction only a formal description of the organ systems named. Any adequate description of an organism must include as its most fundamental and important part an account of the attributes and qualities of that organism « as a whole »[1].
Now a little consideration will serve to convince one that the ordinary methods of description as used in biology fail (i. e., become altogether inadequate) when the attempt is made to deal with any group of individuals, as for example a population, race, variety, species or larger group. These methods fail because they are fundamentally and necessarily incapable of giving a description of the group (whatever its magnitude) «in terms of anything but the individuals which compose it. » That is to say they have no way of getting at a description of a group (e. g., a species) « as a whole » or as such, in terms of its (the group's) attributes and qualities. Let an illustration make this point clear. The purpose of systematic zoology is to classify and arrange animals in natural groups. As a necessary step in the carrying out of this purpose it is obliged to attempt to define, which means describe, these groups. But its whole way of going about this process is a
confession of the fundamental inadequacy of the method. The
- ↑ This point has been developed in a masterly way in a recent paper by Prof. Wm. E. Bitter, having the title Life from the Biologist's Standpoint in « Pop. Sc. Monthly », August, 1909.
