36 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



be able to complete his theory of "Mneme" until, guided by 

 the experience of Jennings and Driesch, he forsakes the blind 

 alle}^ of mechanisticism and retraces his steps to reasonable 

 vitalism. 



But the most notable publications bearing on our matter are 

 incidental to the Darwin Celebrations of 1908-9. Dr. Francis 

 Darwin, son, collaborator, and biographer of Charles Darwin, 

 was selected to preside over the meeting of the British Associa- 

 tion held in Dublin in 1908, the jubilee of the first publications 

 on Natural Selection by his father and Alfred Russel Wallace. 

 In this address we find the theory of Hering, Butler, Rignano 

 and Semon taking its place as a vera causa of that variation 

 which natural selection must find before it can act, and recog- 

 nised as the basis of a rational theory of the development of 

 the individual and of the race. The organism is essentially 

 purposive: the impossibility of devising any adequate accounts 

 of organic form and function without taking account of the 

 psychical side is most strenuously asserted. And with our 

 regret that past misunderstandings should be so prominent in 

 Butler's works, it was very pleasant to hear Francis Darwin's 

 quotation from Butler's translation of Hering ^ followed by a 

 personal tribute to Butler himself. 



In commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles 

 Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the 

 Origin of Species, at the suggestion of the Cambridge Philo- 

 sophical Society the University Press published during the 

 past year a volume entitled Darwin and Modern Science, 

 edited by Mr. A. C. Seward, Professor of Botany in the Uni- 

 versity. Of the twenty-nine essays by men of science of the 

 highest distinction, of peculiar interest to the readers of Samuel 

 Butler, is that on Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights, by 

 Prof. W. Bateson, F.R.S., to whose work on Discontinuous 

 Variations we have already referred. Here once more Butler 

 receives from an official biologist of the first rank full recog- 

 nition for his wonderful insight and keen critical power ; this 

 is the more noteworthy because Bateson has apparently no 

 faith in the transmission of acquired characters. Such a 



* " Between the ' me ' of to-day and the ' me ' of yesterday lie night and sleep, 

 abysses of unconsciousness ; nor is there any bridge but memory with which to 

 span \\\tm" {U/iCOfiscious Meinof)', "p. no). 



