THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



mitted too long to the incubus of the cell, and that 

 the attempt to explain the whole organism as an ag- 

 gregation of separate cells can lead to no useful end. 

 They are even beginning to doubt that life can be 

 subjected to the microscope. Professor William Rit- 

 ter has recently given us an elaborate discussion for 

 and against the cell theory and concludes that life 

 must be studied from the aspect of the organism as a 

 unit.^*^ Of all the biologists whom Professor Ritter 

 quotes, no one seems to me to have seen so clearly 

 and to have expressed so simply the evidence against 

 the theory of the cell as has Professor Whitman. 

 Even the biologists should heed such of his opinions 

 as these: "May we not go further, and say that an 

 organism is an organism from the egg onward, quite 

 independently of the number of cells present^ In that 

 case, continuity of organization would be the essen- 

 tial thing, while division into cell-territories might 

 be a matter of quite secondary importance. . . . The 

 more carefully we compare the cleavage in different 

 eggs, the more clear it becomes that the test of or- 

 ganization in the egg does not lie in its mode of 

 cleavage, but in subtile formative processes. The 

 plastic forces heed no cell-boundaries, but mould the 

 germ-mass regardless of the way it is cut up into cells. 

 . . . The essence of organization can no more lie in 

 the number of nuclei [of the cells] than in the num- 

 ber of cells. The structure which we see in a cell-mo- 



2" W. E. Ritter, The Unity of the Organism, Gorhatn Press, 2 vols. 



C 286 3 



