Introductory 15 



processes cannot be referred to cell-division, to what can 

 tliev be referred? To cellular interaction? . . . The 

 answer . . . will ... as Wiesncr has so well insisted, find 

 a common basis for every grade of organization. It will 

 fin<l the secret of organization, growth, development, not in 

 cell-division, but in those ultimate elements of living matter 

 for which idiosomes seems to me an appropriate name." ^* 

 This sentence, w^ith those immediately following it, leaves 

 no question that in 1893, when he wrote the essay in which 

 it occurs. Whitman was at heart an elementalist as much as 

 was Lucretius or Schwann or Weismann. The only real 

 step he had taken in the direction of the organismal stand- 

 point was that of seeing clearly that the cells could not be 

 '^ultimate units" of organization. Indeed there is consider- 

 able indication that so far as the general problem is con- 

 cerned, tlie position he held in 1893 was somewhat backward 

 from that w^hich he held five years before, when he w^rote The 

 Seat of Formative and Regenerative Energy, for in that 

 essay he said: "Let us now consider whether any rational 

 basis can be found for the idea of a formative power as a 

 resultant from, and an expression of, physiological unity. 

 I am fully conscious that the subject is one of profound 

 mystery, the solution of which appears to lie as far beyond 

 our grasp to-day as at any time in the past. We draw 

 nearer to the problem, but the effect is rather to enhance 

 than to reduce its apparent magnitude. Every step in ad- 

 vance only brings us to a keener sense of the subtle and 

 incomprehensible nature of the force or forces contem- 

 plated." 1^ 



The extent and nature of Wilson's faltering between the 

 two standpoints, even as between the organism and its cells, 

 in spite of his constant and earnest appeal to the the organ- 

 ism as the "only real unity" we shall consider in some de- 

 tail when we deal with the cell-theory. 



Lillie has, I believe, advanced farther toward the con- 



