PROGRESS IN ZOOLOGY — WILSON. 403 



Genetic research now confronts us with essentially the same question 

 as applied to the evolutionary germ. The puzzle of the microcosm 

 has become that of the macrocosm. Were the primitive forms of life 

 really simpler than their apparently more complex descendants? 

 Has organic evolution been from the simple to the complex or only 

 from one kind of complexity to another? May it even have been 

 from the complex to the simple by successive losses of inhibiting fac- 

 tors which, as they disappear, set free qualities previously held in 

 check ? The last of these is the startling question that the president 

 of the British association propounds in his recent brilliant address at 

 Melbourne, asking us seriously to open our minds to the inquiry, 

 "Whether evolution can at all reasonably be represented as an un- 

 packing of an original complex which contained within itself the 

 whole range of complexity which living things exhibit?'' This con- 

 ception, manifestly, is nearly akin to the theory of pangenesis and 

 individual development, as elaborated especially by De Vries and by 

 Weismann. It inevitably recalls also, if less directly, Bonnet's vision 

 of " palingenesis," which dates from the eighteenth century. 



We should be grateful to those who help us to open our minds; 

 and Prof. Bateson, as is his wont, performs this difficult operation 

 in so large and masterly a fashion as to command our lively admira- 

 tion. It must be said of his picturesque and vigorous discussion that 

 we are kept guessing how far we are expected to take it seriously, 

 or at least literally. We have always a lurking suspicion that pos- 

 sibly his main purpose may after all be to remind us, by an object 

 lesson, how far we still are from comprehending the nature and 

 causes of evolution, and this suspicion is strengthened by the explicit 

 statement in a subsequent address, delivered at Sydney, that our 

 knowledge of the nature of life is " altogether too slender to war- 

 rant speculation on these fundamental questions." Let us, however, 

 assume that we are seriously asked to go further and to enter the cul 

 de sac that Prof. Bateson so invitingly places in our way. Once 

 within it, evidently, we are stalemated in respect to the origin and 

 early history of life; but as to that, one form of total ignorance is 

 perhaps as good as another, and we can still work out how the game 

 has been plaj^ed, even though we can never find out how the pieces 

 were set up. But has the day so soon arrived when we must resign 

 ourselves to such an ending? Are we prepared to stake so much 

 upon the correctness of a single hypothesis of allelomorphism and 

 dominance? This hypothesis — that of " presence and absence " — has 

 undoubtedly been a potent instrument of investigation ; but there are 

 some competent students of genetics who seem to find it equally sim- 

 ple to formulate and analyze the phenomena by the use of a quite 

 different hypothesis, and one that involves no such paradoxical con- 



