There must be some reason why this, the oldest of all, has been recently called a _new_ science, and some explanation of the fact that it has only recently advanced to form a distinct department in our educational system. The reason is not difficult to find. Biology is a new science, not because the objects it studies are new, but because it has adopted a new relation to those objects and is studying them from a new standpoint. Animals and plants have been studied long enough, but not as we now study them. Perhaps the new attitude adopted toward living nature may be tersely expressed by saying that in the past it has been studied as _at rest_, while to-day it is studied as _in motion_. The older zoologists and botanists confined themselves largely to the study of animals and plants simply as so many museum specimens to be arranged on shelves with appropriate names. The modern biologist is studying these same objects as intensely active beings and as parts of an ever-changing history. To the student of natural history fifty years ago, animals and plants were objects to be _classified_; to the biologist of to-day, they are objects to be _explained_. To understand this new attitude, a brief review of the history of the fundamental features of philosophical thought will be necessary. When, long ago, man began to think upon the phenomena of nature, he was able to understand almost nothing. In his inability to comprehend the activities going on around him he came to regard the forces of nature as manifestations of some supernatural beings. This was eminently natural. He had a direct consciousness of his own power to act, and it was natural for him to assume that the activities going on around him were caused by similar powers on the part of some being like himself, only superior to him. Thus he came to fill the unseen universe with gods controlling the forces of nature. The wind was the breath of one god, and the lightning a bolt thrown from the hands of another.