EVOLUTION AND EPIGENESIS. 211 



Are Bourne, Hertwig, and others putting the question cor- 

 rectly in the form of the old dilemma? Are we bound to 

 accept either horn ? Was not the antagonism of the epigenesis 

 and evolution of last century due, in part, to errors in both direc- 

 tions ? and has it not become quite certain that, as there was 

 error, so there was truth, on both sides ? Does not Mr. Mivart ^ 

 state the situation correctly when he says, — " The idea of 

 evolution, as now understood, far from being antagonistic, is 

 complementary, to that of epigenesis " ? Roux, although 

 among the first to suggest that present issues remind of the 

 old, now protests against Hertwig's alternative — "preforma- 

 tion or epigenesis " — and defines our task to be " to deter- 

 mine the actual share of each of the two ^ formative principles 

 in individual development." Even Hertwig, though a zealous 

 apostle of the gospel of epigenesis, claims that his view seeks 

 "to extract from the doctrines of epigenesis and evolution, 

 what is good and serviceable in each." Weismann, while 

 declaring himself an "evolutionist," makes large allowance 

 for epigenesis, as his Romanes Lecture makes abundantly 

 evident. 



The drift of opinion, as it seems to me, is neither back to 

 the standpoint of Harvey and Wolff, nor to that of Bonnet and 

 Haller, but towards a new standpoint, which seeks to avoid 

 the errors, and blend the truth, of the old hypotheses. 



The use of the same name for different things is always 

 liable to lead to confusion, and perhaps some of the latest con- 

 tentions on questions of development have been obscured in 

 this way. Evolution, standing at first as the antitheton of 

 epigenesis, has come down to us as a synonym for it, and is 

 now a popular term — a sort of omnium-gatherum — for all 

 extant views of development. It claims alike the two great 

 antagonistic factions in the biological world, the Lamarckians 

 and the Weismannians, and repudiates only the creation hypoth- 

 esis, the very doctrine on which it originally rested. 



Views have multiplied, and the necessity for definition finds 



1 Science Progress, August. 



2 "Den wirklichen Antheil jedes der beiden Gestaltungsprincipien an der indi- 

 viduellen Entwickelung zu ermitteln." Gott. gel. Anz., No. 9, 1894. 



