Bion

“ Bion of Smyrna, a contemporary of Theocritus, emigrated to Sicily for the purpose of studying pastoral poetry in its native haunts. What little we know respecting his life is gathered from the elegy written by his pupil, the delicate and graceful Moschus, a bucolic poet of Syracuse ranked with Theocritus and Bion, but inferior to both. “The Lament for Bion” intimates that he died from the effects of poison, administered perhaps by jealous rivals.
Bion’s love-songs and pastorals are characterized by sweetness and finish; they are less life-like, however, than those of Theocritus. ”

“ He could have beaten Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and all. Under picturesque influences, he never failed to add beauty to beauty. In the original of the passage we have alluded to, which he imitated from Bion, (the story of Cupid and the Fowler,) Bion merely makes the young fowler take Cupid in the trees for a bird, and endeavour to ensnare him ”

“ Somewhat similar in nature is Osborn’s suggestion that the peculiar properties of living protoplasm may be due to the presence of a unique chemical element called Bion. (Cf. “The Origin and Evolution of Life,” 1917, p. 6.) Now, a chemical element unlike other chemical elements is not a chemical element at all. Osborn’s Bion, like Moore’s biotic energy, ought, by all means, to make up its mind definitely on Hamlet’s question [Pg 171] of “to be, or not to be.” The policy of “It is, and it is not,” is not likely to win the approval of either mechanists or vitalists. ”

“ Biology, the science of animal life in a purely physical reference, or of life in organised bodies generally, including that of plants, in its varied forms and through its successive stages.
Bion, a Greek pastoral poet of 3rd century B.C., born at Smyrna; a contemporary of Theocritus; settled in Sicily; was poisoned, it is said, by a rival; little of his poetry survives.
Biot, Jean Baptiste, an eminent French mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, born at Paris; professor of Physics in the College of France ”

“ We speak of the life-unity of the former as an actual bion, and that of the latter as a virtual bion; in other words, the physiological individual or the life-unity has in the first case reached the highest stage of individual development that pertains to its species, while in the second case it remains at the lowest stage of virtual formation, and has only the capacity of rising to the higher stage. In the higher plants and animals only one cell of the organism, or the two combined sexual cells (ovum and spermium) , are the potential bion which may develop into an actual one. ”

“ And by reason that such impressions render them timorous, he forbids in his Laws all such threatening doctrines, and all persuasion that anything of ill can befall a man from the gods, excepting for his great good when they happen to him, and for a medicinal effect. They say of Bion that, infected with the atheism of Theodoras, he had long had religious men in great scorn and contempt, but that death surprising him, he gave himself up to the most extreme superstition; as if the gods withdrew and returned according to the necessities of Bion. ”

“ Bion was essentially a popular writer, and in his Diatribae he satirized the follies of mankind in a manner calculated to appeal to the sympathies of a low-class audience. While eulogizing poverty and philosophy, he attacked the gods, musicians, geometricians, astrologers, and the wealthy, and denied the efficacy of prayer. ”

“ Bion adds, that, to take her, he had to use deceit and fly away; for the Amazons, he says, being naturally lovers of men, were so far from avoiding Theseus when he touched upon their coasts, that they sent him presents to his ship; but he, having invited Antiope, who brought them, to come aboard, immediately set sail and carried her away. ”

“ The subjects of Bion's poetry, viz. shepherds' and love-songs, are beautifully described by Moschus (iii. 82, &c.) ; but we can now form only a partial judgment on the spirit and style of his poetry, on account of the fragmentary condition in which his works have come down to us. Some of his idyls, as his poems are usually called, are extant entire, but of others we have only fragments. Their style is very refined, the sentiments soft and sentimental, and his versification (he uses the hexameter exclusively) is very fluent and elegant. ”

“ The drawings of society are almost invariably dainty and pleasing, the serious scenes of tragedy leave the spectator quite unmoved. Thus it is but natural that these artists should have shone most in the illustration of airy trifles like Dorat's "Baisers," or tales like Manon Lescaut, or in designing tailpieces for translations of the Greek idyllic poets, such as Moschus and Bion. In some of his illustrations of books, especially, perhaps, in the designs for "La Physiologie de Gout" (Jouaust, Paris, 1879) , M. Lalauze has shown himself the worthy rival of Eisen and Cochin. ”

“ Nicolas Bion (1652-1733) may be cited as an excellent example of such a skilful workman, achieving in his day great distinction as a globe maker.137 He seems not to have thought of himself as one meriting special honors as geographer, cartographer or astronomer (Fig. 123) . By reason of his marked abilities, exhibited in the manufacture of mathematical instruments, 153he was honored by his royal patron with the title Engineer of the King for Mathematical Instruments. ”

“ Thus they lay the foundations of life. This carbonaceous material with properties of movement and subdivision due to mechanical and physical forces is the immediate ancestor of the first imaginary living being, the protobion. ”

“ The causal-nexus of biontic (individual) and phyletic (historical) evolution, which I gave in my General Morphology as the supreme law at the root of all biogenetic research, has a universal application to psychology no less than to morphology. I have fully treated the special importance which it has with regard to man, in both respects, in the first chapter of my Anthropogeny. In man, as in all other organisms, “the embryonic development is an epitome of the historical development of the species. ”

“ Not even in the fact that the tissues and organs of a single physiological individual stand in great dependence upon one another through physical causes,303 is there any690 striking difference between this view and the phyletic composition of the animal (and vegetable) kingdom out of physiological individuals (Haeckel’s “Bionten”) , since contemporaneous animals (individuals and species) are known to influence one another in the most active manner. ”

“ We need what might be called a bionomic base line, an idea of the conditions which existed before man came upon the scene, the conditions which would again supervene if the human inhabitants were withdrawn. ”

“ Darwin may be said to have founded the science of bionomics, and at the same time to have given new stimulus and new direction to morphography, physiology, and plasmology, by uniting them as contributories to one common biological doctrine—the doctrine of organic evolution—itself but a part of the wider doctrine of universal evolution based on the laws of physics and chemistry. ”

“ To the rich and the poor, the old and the young, at all times, comes the rich, sweet melody of this song of humanity to comfort and to cheer. For eighty years the light of Odd-Fellowship has burned before the world, a beacon to the lost, a comfort to the wanderer and a protection to the thoughtless. Eighty years of work for humanity's sake; eighty years devoted to teaching men to love mankind; eighty years of earnest labor, consecrated by friendship, cemented with love and beautified by truth. ”

“ Binet describes man as a colony of protozoans; and according to these two biologists he is a walking Chinese Empire, when you consider the microscopic beings in his body. Besides our bodies and those of vegetable and animal organism that are thus honeycombed and flooded with animalculine life, there are countless millions floating in the air, swimming in the water, and buried in the dust of the earth. ”

“ Passing over, then, our author's theory of the origination of life from inorganic matter as utterly untenable, we come to the next point in his system,—the most chimerical of all,—the gradual development of the higher orders of being out of those next beneath them in the scale. It is not pretended, that there is any known instance of the transmutation of species, or of the evolution, in the ordinary way, of any being specifically different from its parents. The same animal, indeed, may pass through different grades of development; but these changes affect only the individual, not the race. ”

“ To Linnæus, the species into which he mapped out all the plants and animals then known, appeared as the descendants each of a solitary progenitor or of a primitive couple, called into existence at the beginning of all things by the direct fiat of a designing Creator. He saw the world of organic life as composed of so many well-demarcated types, each separate, distinct, and immutable, each capable of producing its like ad infinitum, and each unable to vary from its central standard in any of its individuals, except perhaps within very narrow and unimportant limits. ”

“ But Giacomo Boni, who when delving down into a few feet of soil had descended from the present period to the stone age, remarked:
“Upon the whole, humanity changes little. What has been shall be.”
“No doubt,” replied Jean Boilly, “man, or that which we call man, changes little. We belong to a definite species. The evolution of the species is of necessity included in the definition of the species. It is impossible to conceive humanity subsequent to its transformation. A transformed species is a lost species. ”

“ We must admit, then, that there are certain neural kineses which, from the fact that they are unassociated with life-preserving and life-continuing activities, are not subject to the law of elimination; and in the development of which natural selection cannot have been an essential factor. These, in their metakinetic aspect, are conceptual thoughts, emotions, and ideas. Remembering the distinction drawn in the chapter on "Organic Evolution" between origin and guidance, let us proceed to inquire, first, how these ideas have been guided to their present development ”

“ On every Earth-type planet that had ever been discovered, if there were intelligent life it had developed according to water-oxygen evolution; and the culture invariably parallelled homo sapiens. It was as if a busy and preoccupied nature had hit upon a pattern which worked and never bothered to change the mold. ”

“ I think it may be useful to dwell a little on the mental laws which I have just opposed to the physical, and whose object is to assure preadaptation and form a finality. [38] Their [164] importance cannot be exaggerated. Thanks to his power of preadaptation, the being endowed with intelligence acquires an enormous advantage over everything which does not reason. No doubt, as has been shrewdly remarked, natural selection resembles a finality, for it ends in an adaptation of beings to their surroundings. There is therefore, strictly speaking, such a thing as finality without intelligence. ”

“ As many of these animals, in their perfect state, are not more than the twelve thousandth part of an inch in diameter, it is not much to be wondered at, that we should not be able in all cases to discover their ova, or to follow these ova through all their stages of development into the complete being. It is farther remarkable, that these animalcules, when once produced, whether by spontaneous or natural generation, are all found to be provided with the organs or requisite means for continuing their species, and, in fact, for multiplying their number from themselves with astonishing rapidity. ”

“ The conception of the world as a vital organism was as yet, indeed, very vague, and unsupported by any detailed, scientific scrutiny of the facts of nature, but it was in the air—it had always been in the air; it always held [Pg 6] the minds of cautious students back from a complete surrender to the facile but illusory way of thinking typified by Paley’s famous analogy of the universe and the watch. Bacon knew that species could be transformed by the action of a new environment.4 Goethe had a clear conception of the evolution theory, based on a study of organic structure. ”

“ The first form of man himself "is that which is permanent in the animalcule"; and thence he comes to resemble successively a fish, a reptile, a bird, and the lower mammifers, before he attains his specific maturity. It is held, then, that a premature birth from an animal of a higher kind might have instituted a new race of a lower type; and that a birth unusually delayed, permitting an embryo to be still farther advanced in the line of organization, might have created a new species of a higher order than the parent. ”

“ And when we come to the primitive germs, so minute as to be visible only through the microscope, no outward distinction, perhaps, is any longer perceptible, and the radical difference of their internal organization is indicated only by the fact, to be verified by subsequent observation, that the two are invariably developed into perfectly distinct animals, belonging respectively to the same races with their parents. A theorist, whose whole system is based upon the invariable operation of natural agencies, cannot reasonably object to this conclusion. ”

“ Men and women were to him like fossils to the geologist, things to be tapped and hammered and dissected and studied with a view not only to the reconstruction of past ages, but to construction in the future. It is known, for instance, that he made an artificial being formed of the tissue, still living, of animals lately killed, with the brain of an ape and the heart of a bullock, and a sheep’s thyroid, and so forth. ”