136 Transactions of the Society. 



notion that we know more about the activities of the Protozoa 

 than we do. 



It appears to me not difficult to conceive of the existence of a 

 mechanism in the protoplasm of the Protozoa which selects and 

 rejects building material, and determines the shapes of the 

 structures built, comparable to that mechanism which is assumed 

 to exist in the nervous system of insects and other animals which 

 "automatically" go through wonderfully elaborate series of com- 

 plicated actions. Darwin and others have attributed the building 

 up of these inherited mechanisms to the age-long action of Natural 

 Selection, and the survival of those individuals possessing qualities 

 or "tricks" of life-saving value. I therefore disagree with Mr. 

 Heron-Allen's opinion that the architectural and selective pheno- 

 mena exhibited by the Foraminifera " have," if I may quote his 

 words, " no relation to Adaptations and Tropisms." On the 

 contrary, they not only have, in my judgment, a close relation to 

 such phenomena, but are of the same nature. 



In reference to the continuity of tlie psychical activities of man 

 with those of lower animals, Huxley's conclusion on this matter long 

 ago commended itself to me (as to most biologists) when he says (as 

 cited by Mr. Heron- Allen), " No structural line of demarcation can 

 be drawn between the animal world and ourselves ; and I may 

 add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a psychical 

 distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of 

 feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life." My 

 own belief in a continuous and gradual development of the highest 

 animals, including man, from such simple beginnings as are to-day 

 represented to us by the Protozoa, does not lead me to assume the 

 existence of the vertebrate notochord, nor even of something akin 

 to that structure, either in Protozoa or in the fertilized egg-cell, 

 from which a man is slowly and regularly developed. Nor does 

 that belief lead me (as Mr. Heron-Allen seems to think it should) 

 to assume the existence in them of mental activities of a high order 

 such as Purpose, defined in the Oxford Dictionary as " the action or 

 fact of intending or meaning to do something ; intention, resolu- 

 tion, determination," and of which an eminent scholar says : — 

 " No such thing as blind or unconscious purpose is conceivable." 

 That belief does not necessitate the assumption that Intelligence 

 and Consciousness exist in Protozoa on the one hand, or in the 

 human foetus on the other. Nevertheless, I know that the dull, 

 unconscious, purposeless fcetus becomes by gradual evolution the 

 new-born babe, the child, the man, and that it was itself gradually 

 evolved from the fertilized egg-cell. There is no break in the 

 series, although there is no manifestation of Purposive Intelligence 

 in the foetus, or of a notochord in the many-celled germ. Both 

 skeletal structure and high mental qualities are gradually acquired 

 " without a break " in the growth of man from the egg. 



