166 The Unity of the Organism 



tlie view that there are certain properties of the whole, con- 

 stituting a principle of unity of organization, that are part 

 of the original inheritance, and tJms continuous through 

 the cycles of the generations and do not arise anew in 

 each.'' '" 



For the present I do no more than remind the reader that 

 the itahcs here are Lillie's, not mine ; and that his clear and 

 empliaticallj expressed conclusion does not rest alone on the 

 experiments presented in the paper quoted from, but had 

 been, in essentials, reached by him through earlier studies 

 on normally developing animals. 



Several of the few biologists who have taken a positive 

 stand against the dogma of the all-sufficiency of the Cell in 

 biology have deplored the well-nigh universal custom of 

 early indoctrinating young students with that part of the 

 cell-theory which I have characterized as vaguely hypothe- 

 tical. Adam Sedgwick in particular concentrated his fire 

 on this aspect of the matter. There can be no doubt that 

 many if not most recent elementary text-books are unwitting 

 sinners in this. On the outmost threshold of the temple 

 of biological science, the student is made to feel, by the 

 priests within, that the head should be bowed, the knee bent 

 and the voice subdued when certain things, some difficultly 

 visible, some wholly invisible, things situated deep in the 

 interiors of the plants and the animals to be studied, are 

 mentioned. Among these minute objects of adoration, the 

 Cell holds a commanding place. "Every scientific animal 

 and plant anatomy must, consequently, take its starting 

 point in the doctrine of the Cell." ^^* No matter how long 

 a shelf of elementary text-books on botany and zoology one 

 examines, he will rarely fail to find something akin to this 

 explicit statement in R. Hertwig's excellent Lehrhuch der 

 Zoologie. 



According to this the anatomy of Vesalius, Wm. Harvey, 

 John Hunter and George Cuvier, and others who lived and 



