The philosophic origins of science and the evolution of the two cultures.

"A small but growing number of American philosophers have opened private [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] This quotation from the New York Times of March 8, 1998, may have been start[ILLEGIBLE TEXT] The quest for knowledge is an old preoccupation with roots in prehistory, [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Among the old civilizations, the Babylonians and Egyptians contributed consider [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] The oldest Greek thinkers were natural philosophers, and it was much later that [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Aristotle was certainly the greatest of this genre of philosophers and is justly [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] To the biologist, Aristotle's work on the "Generation of the Animals" is of [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Aristotle repeatedly pointed out that his predecessors' work and conclusions [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Up to the time of Aristotle, there had been no serious attempts at classification [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Under blooded animals: humans, viviparous quadrupeds, oviparous quadrupeds, [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Under bloodless animals: malacostraca (soft-shelled, crustacea); malakia (soft, [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Aristotle also classified animals according to their mode of reproduction, but the [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] In his work on the reproduction of animals, Aristotle differentiates sexual and as [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Aristotle has been called the first evolutionist. His theory of evolution lies not on Aristotle constantly compares nature and the products of nature with art and the [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Although Aristotle was not the last of the era in which the study of nature was in [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] In his controversial Rede lecture presented in Cambridge in 1959, C.P. Snow (19 Snow, of course, was addressing a situation prevalent in England and Europe in [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Every era has had such exceptional individuals. The Renaissance produced a [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] without heart, or any bowels or intestines or skin. And here, therefore, it would [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Leonardo's counterpart in the 20th century is undoubtedly Albert Schweitzer (18 is summed up in the term Reverence for Life, a universal code of ethics that [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Norman Cousins, the late editor of the now sadly defunct Saturday Review, visit [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] The Aristotles, the da Vincis, the Goethes, the Jeffersons, the Schweitzers are, in [Alpha][Epsilon]i, possessions forever. We admire them, stand in awe of them, but they are in a [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Some of these gifted people have attained a measure of fame, and we can read [ILLEGIBLE TEXT] Smith became ill and returned to England, where he died some months later of [ILLEGIBLE TEXT]

A Tadpole and a Fish Langdon Smith

I

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish,

In the Paleozoic time,

And side by side in the ebbing tide

We sprawled through the ooze and slime,

Or skittered with many a caudal flip

Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,

My heart was rife with the joy of life

For I loved you even then.

II

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved,

And mindless at last we died;

And deep in a rift of the Caradoc drift

We slumbered side by side.

The world turned on in the lathe of time,

The hot land heaved amain,

Till we caught our breath from the womb of death,

And crept into light again.

III

We were Amphibians, scaled and tailed

And drab as a dead man's hand;

We coiled at ease 'neath the dripping trees,

Or trailed through the mud and the sand,

Croaking and blind with our three-clawed feet

Writing a language dumb,

With never a spark in the empty dark

To hint at a life to come.

IV

Yet happy we lived, and happy we loved,

And happy we died once more;

Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold

Of a Neocomian shore.

The eons came, and the eons fled,

And the sleep that wrapped us fast

Was riven away in a newer day,

And the night of death was past.

V

Then light and swift through the jungle trees

We swung in our airy flights,

Or breathed in the balms of the fronded palms,

In the hush of the moonless nights.

And oh! What beautiful years were these,

When our hearts clung each to each;

When life was filled, and our senses thrilled

In the first faint dawn of speech.

VI

Thus life by life, and love by love,

We passed through the cycles strange,

And breath by breath, and death by death,

We followed the chain of change.

Till there came a time in the law of life

When over the nursing sod

The shadows broke, and the soul awoke

In a strange, dim dream of God.

VII

I was thewed like an Auroch bull,

And tusked like the great Cave Bear;

And you, my sweet, from head to feet,

Were gowned in your glorious hair.

Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave,

When the night fell o'er the plain,

And the moon hung red o'er the river bed,

We mumbled the bones of the slain.

VIII

I flaked a flint to a cutting edge,

And shaped it with brutish craft;

I broke a shank from a woodland dank,

And fitted it, head and haft.

Then I hid me close to the ready tarn,

Were the Mammoth came to drink;

Through brawn and bone I drave the stone,

And slew him upon the brink.

IX

Loud I howled through the moonlight wastes,

Loud answered our kith and kin;

From west and east to the crimson feast

The clan came trooping in.

O'er joint and gristle and padded hoof,

We fought and clawed and tore,

And cheek by jowl, with many a growl,

We talked the marvel o'er.

X

I carted that fight on a reindeer bone,

With rude and hairy hand,

I pictured his fall on the cavern wall

That men might understand.

For we lived by blood, and the right of might,

Ere human laws were drawn,

And the Age of Sin did not begin

Till our brutal tusks were gone.

XI

And that was a million years ago,

In a time that no man knows;

Yet here tonight in the mellow light,

We sit in Delmonico's;

Your eyes are as deep as the Devon springs,

Your hair is as dark as jet,

Your years are few, your life is new,

Your soul untried; and yet

XII

Our trail is on the Kimmeridge clay,

And the scarp of the Purbeck flags,

We have left our bones in the Bagshot stones,

And deep in the Coraline crags;

Our love is old, our lives are old,

And death shall come amain;

Should it come today, what man may say

We shall not live again."?

XIII

God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds

And furnished them wings to fly;

He sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn,

And I know that it shall not die,

Though cities have sprung above the graves

Where the crook-boned men made war,

And the ox-wain creaks, o'er the buried caves

Where the mummied mammoths are.

XIV

Then as we linger at luncheon here,

O'er many a dainty dish,

Let us drink anew to the time when you

Were a Tadpole and I was a Fish.

(1) Aristotelian lecture given at the 9th International Clinical Genetics Seminar, July 4, 1998, Limassol, Cyprus. Parts of this lecture were published in "Cosmos, 1999," the Journal of the Cosmos Club of Washington, D.C.

Dr. Myrianthopoulos is a scientist emeritus, the National Institutes of Health, where he conducted research on the genetics of nervous system disorders. He was born in Cyprus, then a British colony. His studies at the University of Athens were interrupted by World War II, during which he served as an officer with the British forces in the Middle East. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota. He and his wife Marjorie have three children, each with two X chromosomes.