390 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 
obeyed, when we recognize the little cross-furrow that separates the 
blastomeres, two and two, leaving in each case three only to meet at 
a point in our diagram, which point is in reality a section of a ridge or 
crest. 
Very few have tried, and one or two (1 know) have tried and not 
succeeded, to trace the action and the effects of surface tension in 
the case of a highly complicated, multisegmented egg. But it is not 
surprising if the difficulties which such a case presents appear to be 
formidable. Even the conformation of the interior of a soap froth, 
though absolutely conditioned by surface tension, presents great 
difficulties, and it was only in the last years of Lord Kelvin’s life 
that he showed all previous workers to have been in error regarding 
the form of the interior cells. 
But what for us does all this amount to? It at least suggests the 
possibility of so far supporting the observed facts of organic form on 
mathematical principles as to bring morphology within or very near 
to Kant’s demand that a true natural science should be justified by 
its relation to mathematics! But if we were to carry these principles 
further and to succeed in proving them applicable in detail, even to 
the showing that the manifold segmentation of the egg was but an 
exquisite froth, would it wholly revolutionize our biological ideas? 
It would greatly modify some of them, and some of the most cherished 
ideas of the majority of embryologists; but I think that the way is 
already paved for some such modification. When Loeb and others 
have shown us that half, or even a small portion of an egg, or a single 
one of its many blastospheres, can give rise to an entire embryo, and 
that in some cases any part of the ovum can originate any part of 
the organism, surely our eyes are turned to the energies inherent in 
the matter of the egg (not to speak of a presiding entelechy), and 
away from its original formal operations of division. Sedgwick has 
told us for many years that we look too much to the individuality of 
the individual cell, and that the organism, at least in the embryonic 
body, is a continuous syncytium. Hofmeister and Sachs have 
repeatedly told us that in the plant, the growth of the mass, the 
growth of the organ, is the primary fact; and De Bary has summed 
up the matter in his aphorism, Die Pflanze bildet Zellen, nicht die 
Zelle bildet Pflanzen. And in many other ways the extreme position 
of the cell theory, that the cells are the ulimate individuals, and 
that the organism is but a colony of quasi independent cells, has of 
late years been called in question. 
There are no problems connected with morphology that appeal so 
closely to my mind, or to my temperament, as those that are related 
i “Tech behaupte aber dass in jeder besonderen Naturlehre nur so viel eigentliche Wissenschaft angetroffen 
werden kénne, als darin Mathematik anzutreffen ist.’”? Kant, in Preface to Metaphys. Anfangsgriinde 
der Naturwissenschaft (Werke, ed. Hartenstein, vol. iv., p. 360). 
