618 JOHN BEARD, 



than any preceding or succeeding embryologist, was, as he himself 

 confesses, decidedly teleological in his conceptions of embryology. 



Of the embryologists of the past century two only, admittedly of 

 the greatest, Carl Ernst von Baer and Johannes Müller, have 

 wittingly followed the true pathway, leading to a knowledge of the 

 development of organisms. Though teleological, their views were not 

 anthropocentric. Both were strenuous opponents of the current dogma 

 of recapitulation. Both were imbued with the idea of discovering the 

 laws, underlying animal development; and, significantly enough, each 

 of them might almost be termed the prophet of antithetic alternation 

 of generations. 



The anthropocentric conception of development then is of the 

 following crude and simple character. The organism produces the germ- 

 cells, these in their turn give rise to the organism. The idea might 

 almost have arisen out of the law of entail of Great Britain! Its 

 very simplicity does not admit of any complications in its fulfilment. 

 The task of the fertilised egg is to give rise to an organism, like that 

 from which the egg itself sprang : all else is of secondary importance ! 

 If there be a well-marked alternation of generations in the life-history 

 this, of course, is a secondary adaptation, introduced for the attain- 

 ment of the original end under special circumstances! Without such 

 an alternation temporary organs, even a transient nervous system, 

 may come into existence out of nothing! Their object is, once more, 

 to preserve the original scheme of the development! This is also ef- 

 fected by ignoring a legion of awkward facts ! 



The organism neither produces the germ-cells, nor is it the chief 

 task of these to give rise to the organism. 



This is a flat denial of the validity of current ideas in two funda- 

 mental points; and it may, perhaps, pave the way, without in the 

 least smoothing it, for a new conception of animal development, as 

 well as one of the germ-cells as unicellular organisms with a definite 

 life-cycle, comparable to that of a protozoon. 



To us as embryologists and men the formation of an embryo 

 has appeared to be everything, the history of the germ-cells a 

 secondary item of no particular moment. Nature, on the other 

 hand, reverses the relative importance of the two, setting the germ- 

 cells in the place of honour, as linking the remote past with the 

 distant future. 



