Introduction 15 



strong currents of cold water in high alpine regions develop 

 details of structure that greatly resemble each other, even 

 in groups that otherwise are systematically apart. Again 

 marine teleosts that have in recent ages become environally 

 adapted to life amid the brilliant colorations of coral cliffs, 

 coves and recesses, now rival in tint and not unfrequently 

 in grotesque structural modifications, the seascape that sur- 

 rounds them. The past forty years also have revealed 

 to science those remarkable groups of deep-sea fishes, which 

 while differing in important details of taxonomic heredity, 

 agree in the huge eyes and other structural features (p.458) 

 that environally have formed in response to the dim light 

 conditions of the deep sea. Though biologists have often 

 disputed over these and many like acquired structural de- 

 tails, till their wordy disputations have almost rivalled those 

 of the medieval "philosophers," these modifications all 

 proclaim exact actions of varied environal agents that affect 

 and slowly modify the organisms involved. The manner 

 in which such modifications are effected will concern us 

 under the next or third heading. 



III. PROENVIRONMENT. 



The writer has shown in another work (7:188,194, 

 205-242,629-651) that in all organisms a correlating and 

 synthesizing action proceeds which he has designated the 

 Law of Proenvironment. Least evident and simplest in 

 action amongst the lowest plants, it becomes increasingly 

 important as one passes to the simpler animals or the 

 higher plants, and thence onward to those more evolved. 

 For in the numerous actions or environal stimuli to which 

 every organism is exposed, it becomes increasingly neces- 

 sary that these stimuli be more and more quickly linked 

 together into a single correlated reaction-response that the 

 organism can make to such stimuli. This correlation and 

 combination-capacity exists in feeble and sluggish manner 

 in the protoplasmic network of simplest plants; becomes 

 largely concentrated in the chromatin-nuclear substance 

 of nucleate plants and lower animals; is still more con- 

 densed in the nerve cells of the simpler animals; and reaches 

 its climax in the complex groupings of nerve-cells that make 



