president's address. 835 



Science to ask and her chief business to answer. To the question 

 whether in such a case an answer can even be conceived it ought 

 to be sufficient to reply that of recent years it has been the object 

 of Weismann's elaborate theory of the architecture of the germ 

 plasma to furnish just such an answer. Whether the effort is 

 well or ill-directed to that object it is beside the question to enquire. 

 If not that solution then another, not less mechanical, may be 

 forthcoming. 



We may therefore pay little heed to those who would bid us 

 cast away the hope that the closer investigation of cell structure 

 and function may enable us to read even these into the convenient 

 if more abstract terms of mechanism. It does not follow that the 

 mechanism itself will be found to be simple. The nucleus of an 

 o\iim, so long as we can say little or nothing of its structure, 

 seems an object of no great complexity. But if we are to make 

 any progress at all on naturalistic lines, the future advance of 

 biological investigation must consist in unravelling the enormous 

 structural complexity with which we are bound to credit it. 

 And as an attempt in this direction even the demand made on 

 the mechanical imagination by Weismann's stupendous germ 

 plasma may be regarded as not greatly excessive. Such an 

 hypothesis as Nageli's micellar theory too might likewise open up 

 a most fruitful field of discovery. 



It appears to me most probable that ere long we shall arrive at 

 ideas with regard to the architecture, not only of the germplasma, 

 but of the cell as a whole on the lines of some such conceptions 

 as are involved in theories like those of Weismann and Niigeli. 



Nor need we pay great heed to the warnings we sometimes 

 hear respecting the bounds to further structural investigation 

 imposed by unavoidable oj)tical limitations, as in the construction 

 of lenses. 



It may be true that by-and-bye we shall reach such optical 

 limits. But the implied assumption is hardly warranted, that 

 only by optical means and methods can we possibly in future 

 gain an insight into what we now term the ultra-microscopical 

 structure of living tissue. It is surely quite amongst the 



