WILLIAM BATESON—MORGAN 531 
rather, that their properties depend on some phenomenon of arrange- 
ment.’ 
“Despite the valiant attempts Bateson made to give as much 
credit as he honestly could to the chromosome theory, it is clear 
from his posthumous paper (Journal of Genetics, Vol. XVL, January, 
1926), that the evidence on which the theory is based was not con- 
genial to his way of thinking. He states that ‘the work of the 
Columbia school has shown beyond possibility of doubt that in 
animals the reduction division must be the moment at which segre- 
gation in respect to Mendelian factors is usually affected.’ Never- 
theless he adds ‘at least in plants of many kinds comparable 
segregations occur at somatic divisions also.’ I should want to 
qualify the latter statement, for some of the cases cited by Bateson 
in plants are capable of a different interpretation, while for others 
the interpretation is very problematical and not certainly due to 
segregation. It is unnecessary to affirm that segregation, like the 
typical Mendelian process, may never be found to occur in somatic 
tissues of animals as well as plants, but the evidence at present does 
not, I think, require this interpretation, while there is clear evi- 
dence that the typical process of segregation both in animals and 
plants occurs at the time of reduction of the chromosomes. Bateson 
also states that ‘if we press for a more exact account of the nature 
of the association subsisting between factors and chromosomes, no 
answer is forthcoming.’ I must dissent also from this somewhat 
positive statement, for we have at least supplied an abundance of 
data that we think answers the question. Whether the answer is 
right or wrong the future alone will decide. 
“ Bateson reviews in his last paper, under the heading of anisogeny, 
some of the interesting problems that have grown out of the work of 
the institute at Merton. His discussion of chimaeras, especially 
those arising from root buds of Pelargonium, is full of suggestion. 
The paper ends with a further shot at the ‘extension and implication’ 
of the chromosome theory. In plants, he again affirms, phenomena 
are met with to which the simple chromosome theory is inapplicable 
and ‘the conviction has grown that the problem of heredity and 
variation is intimately connected with that of somatic differentia- 
tion.’ In these respects the chromosome theory ‘has fallen short of 
the essential discovery.’ Here, once more, I find my point of view 
miles apart from that of Bateson. If by the ‘essential discovery ’ 
he had meant the connection between the postulated genes and the 
differentiation of the cells of the embryo, then no one would deny 
that we are still much in the dark, but the whole context of his 
statement can not be twisted into such a meaning. There is no 
need to dwell on these points on which we disagree so radically, for 
there is so much on which we could agree that it is an easy and 
