As an inspiration to the general student the field of biology has always held an important place, and in these modern times its fascination is as potent as ever. Men have attacked the problems of life from many different viewpoints with greatly different aim and great difference in preparation and method in their work. Some of these have sought merely for inspiration for literary effort, but so far as their records have been exact and truthful they are contributions to science, when mixed with “vain imaginings” they become literature and not science, although their right to rank here may depend on literary merit. Every gradation from pure fiction to pure science may be found and every grade of literary merit as well. White and Goldsmith, Wood and Figuier, Kipling and Seton-Thompson, with many others that could be cited, illustrate this wide divergence among writers who have written to the entertainment and the greater or less profit of their readers. The value of such works as these is rather hard to estimate, especially from the scientific standpoint and particularly when one is under the hallucination of a beautiful piece of literary creation. They furnish entertainment and cultivate imagination, some of them stimulate observation and awaken an interest in nature, but unfortunately many of them contain so much that is inexact or erroneous that they may sadly encumber the minds of their readers. But I would like to call attention here to what appears to me a fundamental condition of scientific work and thereby a necessary result of scientific training. Science is naught if not exact. Accurate observation, accurate record, accurate deduction from data, all of which may be reduced to simple, plain honesty. Anything else is error, not science. It is not that “honesty is the best policy,” but that in science honesty is the only possible policy. Hence, scientific training should give to every student this one at least of the cardinal virtues, and we may claim with justice this advantage as one of the results to be derived from pursuing scientific studies. In fact the relation of science and biological science, no less than any other, to general schemes of education, has been one of its most important contributions to humanity. Biology has influenced modern education both in the matter taught and the method of its presentation. It has gone farther and farther into the mysteries of nature and opened up wider fields of knowledge. It has insisted that the student should be trained not only in the facts and the accurate interpretation of facts, but in the methods by which facts may be obtained, thus providing for the continuous growth of the substance from which its principles may be verified and definite conclusions reached.