THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY 



JULY, 1906 



THE RELATIONS OF EMBRYOLOGY TO MEDICAL 



PROGRESS 1 



By CHARLES SEDGWICK MINOT, S.B., S.D., LL.D., D.Sc, 



JAMES STILLMAN PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE ANATOMY IN THE HARVARD 

 MEDICAL SCHOOL, BOSTON 



[7! MBR YOLOGY is the most complex subject in the domain of 

 -*— * science. Living beings are the most complex objects which 

 nature offers us for study, and of this great class the higher animals 

 exceed all others in complexity. The anatomist who studies the struc- 

 ture of the adult has a finished apparatus to investigate; a machine 

 which has been perfected, in which, to be sure, nature may still make 

 repairs, but in the pattern of which she makes no radical changes. 

 The physiologist deals with this machine at work. The embryologist, 

 on the contrary, has for his theme the history of this machine and of 

 its gradual production from a single cell and the progeny thereof. 

 During the period of development the machine at every stage is a 

 different machine from that which it was in the stage before and 

 which it will become in the stage after, and yet in every stage it is 

 actively at work performing its proper physiological functions. We 

 have to deal not with a condition, but with a series of conditions, 

 each of which is at once the consequence of that which went before 

 and the cause of that which is to follow. The final problem of 

 embryology is to determine the origin and cause of the structure of 

 the living body, and incidentally it has to deal with the associated 

 problems of teratology, growth, heredity and sex. 



We acknowledge the immensity of the questions for which em- 

 bryological science must seek answers, but it is far from my intention 



1 Oration delivered before the Maine State Medical Association, June 14, 

 1906, at Portland, Maine. 



