460 Ei7ner on Growth and Inheritmice 



Such development and such re-growth are not to be ex- 

 plamed as Professor Eimer would explain them. He speaks 

 only of the establishment 'in every developing and every 

 adult organism ' of ' a relation of the particles to one another, 

 which finds its expression in their striving to form them- 

 selves into the whole, and to maintain or re-estabhsh the 

 co-ordinated whole.' The striving of separate particles, each 

 governed only by its own mnate forces, can never serve to 

 explain their definite, mutual, orderly collocation as one 

 organic whole. Try as we may, the profoundly rational 

 conception of the great Macedonian philosopher will again 

 and again force itself upon the unprejudiced mind, for 

 the explanation it affords is a natural explanation, and in 

 philosophy no less than in the conduct of human life 

 we may indeed say, ' Naturam expellas furca, tamen usqvue 

 recurret' 



The controversy between the Professors of Tubingen and 

 Freiburg is to us a very interesting one. So far Professor 

 Eimer appears, in our judgment, to have, on the whole, the 

 best of the dispute. But, effective as he is m his attack upon 

 Professor Weismann's doctrines, he exhibits marvellously 

 little capability of defence. The doctrine that merely minute 

 haphazard changes in the molecular constitution of germ- 

 plasm are sufficient to account for all the beauty, all the 

 variety, all the adaptations, and all the varieties of feeling, 

 habit, and instinct to be found in the hving world, he indeed 

 triumphantly demolishes. But his attempt to show that all 

 these powers, harmonies, and beauties are due to nothing but 

 the hereditary transmission of the action of the environment 

 he fails, almost ludicrously, to establish. However thoroughly 

 the faith of the Xeo-Darwinians may be overthrown, we 

 certainly shall not thereby be led to take so retrograde a step 

 as would be a return to the old discredited hypothesis of 

 Lamarck and the 'Yestiges of Creation.' Nevertheless we 



