98 ADAPTATION AND DISEASE 



says Professor Bateson, in nature it is the opposite : it is by the 

 progressive loss of properties that from being an amorphous mass 

 of protoplasm man has become man. Life, according to him, 

 first appeared upon earth enshrined in matter of maximum 

 complexity, so complex that it was without form and void, and 

 only as through the vast aeons of geological time this matter 

 fell into order and simplified itself, and successive species 

 developed, did we eventually in these latter days arrive at the 

 simplest and least complex of all creatures — man, simple man. 



Does it not appear to you that this is Topsy-turvydom ? 

 Is it not on the face of it more probable that the reverse has 

 been the case, that the earliest matter that could be recognized 

 as living was the simplest ? It is not that the earliest living matter 

 possessed all the determinants of all the organized parts of all 

 future forms of life, but that its constitution was such that it 

 possessed from that constitution, and in consequence of its 

 metabolic activities, the potentiality to undergo progressive 

 modifications of that constitution, which modifications mani- 

 fested themselves, as an outcome, in progressive changes of 

 structure. The potentiality was there, not the determinants. 



Conclusion 



One last word. I feel that as one on active service some 

 apology may be required from me for having taken your time, 

 and, it may be said, my country's time, in dealing in the course 

 of these lectures with a matter so wholly foreign to the war, 

 to military medicine and military duties. Were what I have 

 placed before you wholly new, had I collected, thought out, 

 and elaborated the material of these lectures during the two 

 years since I received the invitation to deliver the course, an 

 apology would, I think, rightly be in place. As a matter of fact 

 these lectures are little beyond what I have taught and written 

 in the fifteen years and more preceding the war : they are a digest 

 and compend of those earlier writings and conclusions, brought 

 up to date by means of modern instances confirmatory of 

 or expanding that earlier work. Four hours before delivering 

 the last of these lectures, in order to complete my references, 

 I went to the Library of the Royal Society of Medicine in Wimpole 

 Street and took out the volume of the British Medical Journal for 



