1906.] 



LOGICAL AND BIOLOGICAL. iO 



stractly. A self-sufficient and self-sustaining living organism, 

 whose being is in itself, is as fabulous as a griffin or a centaur, but 

 no naturalist thinks, for an instant, that this truth casts any doubt 

 upon the real existence of living things. While living things are 

 real their reality or being is not absolute but dependent and relative. 



One modern school of embryologists tells us that while the 

 development of the egg into an individual organism is due to the 

 reciprocal interaction between the germ and its environment, the 

 species is in the germ as it is in itself ; because, if it were not, like 

 could not produce like. Like never does produce like, in any literal 

 or absolute sense. If what has come about once may come about 

 again under like conditions ; it is among the possibilities of nature 

 that a new animal kingdom, as rich and diversified as the one we 

 know, might arise, in course of ages, from a starting point in the 

 germ cells of some modern animal ; for we know of nothing in the 

 architecture of germ plasm that forbids. 



If I venture at this late day to point out that ancestral develop- 

 ment may be as epigenetic, from beginning to end, as individual 

 development, and that the species for which we are seeking is not, 

 and cannot be in the germ, I do so because the discovery is neither 

 new nor original with me. It is so old that '' up to date " zoologists 

 tell us it is antiquated, abandoned, no longer worthy the attention 

 of advanced thinkers. 



According to this view, the species is not in chromatin, nor in 

 germ cells, nor in differentiated cells, nor in gemmules, nor in idio- 

 plasm, nor in biophores nor in allelomorphs, nor in living beings at 

 any stage of their existence, nor in the conditions of existence, be- 

 cause it is in that reciprocal interaction between the living being 

 and the natural world, of which it is a part, which has been called 

 the struggle for existence. Neither the stability of species nor the 

 mutability of species is in living beings, because it is through ex- 

 termination in the struggle for existence that the type is kept true 

 to its kind, and also through this struggle that it becomes slowly 

 changed. 



You will note that it is as great an error to locate species in the 

 external world as it is to locate it in germ cells, or in chromatin. It 



