President's Address. 39 



Burbank has obtained dozens of new forms of fruits, flowers, and 

 forage plants. By hybridization and selection he has been able to 

 change, almost at will, old hereditary instincts and obtain the new 

 ones he desired. Slightly modifying Mr. Burbank's statements 

 respecting his work, he may be said to have found in his ten or 

 fifteen years of wonderful experimentation that the powers pos- 

 sessed by life are the resultant of a mixed heredity from thousands 

 of ancestors, and are, and have been, modified by life to better 

 meet the conditions imposed by erivironment. 



Thus the observations of Burbank as to what constitutes the 

 true mainsprings of variation have still further emancipated life 

 from the Darwinian, materialistic, continuity theory of variation. 

 Thus enthroned in the thoughts of modern scientists, life may now 

 be studied as she manifests herself in myriads of living forms, pro- 

 duced at her own sweet will and varied at pleasure, without in- 

 voking any tropism theory to account for her activities, or any 

 Weismann germ plasm theory, or any Mendelian law, to limit her 

 power to transmit her qualities or to vary them in her descendants 

 by her own conscious powers. 



Untrammeled by olden-time restrictions, the study of life has pro- 

 gressed by leaps and bounds. The now universally accepted theory 

 of evolution requires that all life activities on earth shall follow 

 one another in a definitely established order: (1) The simple shall 

 precede the complex; (2) the variable shall end in becoming 

 stable; (3) new characters shall be added to the old, and may 

 overshadow and obscure them. 



All evolutionists, therefore, may believe that the first activities 

 of life were simple and variable and were consciously performed. 

 By repetition, these in the individual, then as now, became habits. 

 These habits persisted in by individuals for a series of generations 

 became hereditary, subconscious activities, belonging to the species 

 or race. And these, in turn, when they had lost the conscious ele- 

 ment, became race instincts. 



This generalization made necessary in teaching biology with life 

 as the dominant influence has relieved the classroom of a world of 

 trouble in explaining the relationship of reason to instinct, and of 

 both to subconscious activity. 



For example, if we regard nest-building as a subconscious activity 

 all difficulties of explanation vanish. The tendency to build nests 

 is instinctive and hereditary, while the act of building the nest is 

 consciously performed and may be varied at the pleasure of the bird, 

 as observation teaches. 



