392 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 
Stephane Leduc, to doubt or to deny that there is any gulf between 
and to hold that spontaneous generation or the artificial creation of 
the living is but a footstep away. Others, like Delage and many 
more, see in the contents of the cell only a complicated chemistry 
and in variation only a change in the nature and arrangement of the 
chemical constituents. They either cling to a belief in ‘‘heredity” 
or (like Delage himself) replace it more or less completely by the 
effects of functional use and by chemical stimulation from without 
and from within. Yet others, like Felix Auerbach, still holding to a 
physical or quasi physical theory of life, believe that in the living 
body the dissipation of energy is controlled by a guiding principle. as 
though by Clerk Maxwell’s demons; that for the living the law of 
entropy is thereby reversed; and that life itself is that which has 
been, evolved to counteract and battle with the dissipation of energy. 
Berthold, who first demonstrated the obedience to, physical laws in 
the fundamental phenomena of the dividing cell or segmenting egg, 
recognizes, almost in the words of John Hunter, a quality in the living 
protoplasm, sui generis, whereby its maintenance, increase, and repro- 
duction are achieved. Driesch, who began as a ‘‘mechanist,’’ now, 
as we have seen, harks back straight to Aristotle, to a twin or triple 
doctrine of the soul. And Bergson, rising into heights of metaphysics 
where the biologist, qua biologist, can not climb, tells us (like Duran) 
that life transcends teleology, that the conceptions of mechanism 
and finality fail to satisfy, and that only ‘‘in the absolute do we live 
and move and have our being.” 
We end but a little way from where we began. 
With all the growth of knowledge, with all the help of all the sciences 
impinging on our own, it is yet manifest, I think, that the. biologists 
of to-day are in no self-satisfied and exultant mood. The reasons 
that for a time contented a past generation call for remquiry, and out 
of the old solutions new questions emerge, and the ultimate problems 
are as inscrutable as of old. That which, above all things, we would 
explain baffles explanation; and that the living organism is a living 
organism tends to reassert itself as the biologist’s fundamental con- 
ception and fact. Nor will even this concept serve us and suffice us 
when we approach the problems of consciousness and intelligence and 
the mystery of the reasoning soul; for these things are not for the 
biologist at all, but constitute the psychologist’s scientific domain. 
In wonderment, says Aristotle, does philosophy begin,! and more 
than once he repeats the saying and more than once he rings the 
changes on the theme. Now, as in the beginning, wonderment and 
admiration are the portion of the biologist, as of all those who con- 
template the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that in them is. 
1 Metaph., I, ii, 9826, 12, ete. 
