022 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1926 
“ That material collected at Hampton and in the following year at 
Beaufort, N. C., led to papers on the early stages of development 
and on the morphology of the adult worm. Ina later paper on ‘ The 
Ancestry of the Chordata’ Bateson discussed, in guarded terms, the 
position of Balanoglossus in relation to the vertebrates, reaching the 
conclusion that the structural resemblances indicated relationship and 
that the unsegmented nature of the notochord and central nerve cord 
indicated that the ancestor was not segmented, and that the repetition 
seen in the body cavities and gill] slits must have had an independent 
origin. This question of repetition haunted Bateson for the rest of 
his life. His later conclusion is interesting. 
“<The meaning of cases of complex repetition will not be found 
in the search for an ancestral form which, itself presenting the same 
character, may be twisted into a representation of its supposed de- 
scendant. Such forms there may be, but in finding them the real 
problem is not even resolved a single stage; for from whence was 
their repetition derived? The answer to the question can only 
come in a fuller understanding of the laws of growth and of varia- 
tion which are as yet merely terms.’ 
“ At the present time—43 years later—this statement may still 
stand word for word. 
’ “Tn 1894 appeared ‘ The Materials for a Study of Variation’ which 
has recently been called Bateson’s most important work. Here he 
brought together a great number of widely scattered cases bearing on 
discontinuity in variation. It is the particular use that Bateson 
made of this evidence that is the most interesting feature of the book. 
He argued that since evidence for discontinuity is to be found every- 
where in animals and plants, evolution through natural selection— 
which he interpreted to mean by the selection of continuous varia- 
tion—will not account for the origin of species. This relationship 
of variation to species formation was a problem that interested Bate- 
son intensely. He recurs to it over and over again in his later writ- 
ings. 
“This book on discontinuity in variation appeared six years be- 
fore de Vries’s mutation theory, in which discontinuity in inherit- 
ance is the central theme, but Bateson seems never to have become 
convinced that the discontinuity shown by de Vries’s mutants in 
Oenothera furnishes the sort of evidence for discontinuity which he 
himself appealed to as supplying the materials for evolution. 
“In the preface to ‘ The Materials’ Bateson says, referring to his 
earlier discussion of the phylogeny of the vertebrates, ‘over it all 
hung the suspicion that the then current morphological arguments 
and interpretations might not be sound.’ In these discussions we 
are continually stopped by such phrases as ‘if such and such a varia- 
