CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS 207 



the organism, but have often decried the value of such 

 attempts. It is still true, therefore, to a large extent 

 that to grasp these theories we must enter a new world 

 of symbols, which only too often appear to have no 

 resemblance or relation to any other symbols commonly 

 in use in scientific thought. When we have become 

 familiar with our new world, we can perform marvelous 

 feats with its symbols and fill our pages with formulae of 

 gametic constitution or what not, but so far as any real 

 connection between this world and the other world of 

 science is concerned, such theories and their symbols 

 leave us, at least in most cases, exactly where we were 

 at the beginning. We can discuss the topographic 

 location of hereditary factors in the chromosome, and 

 we can arrange them in any way necessary to account 

 for the observed facts. In fact, we can invent symbols to 

 describe development or any other process in the organ- 

 ism. But some of the discussions which have to do 

 with these static, morphological symbols remind us 

 irresistibly of that old problem of the angels and the 

 needle point. 



Being entirely unable to find any degree of intellec- 

 tual satisfaction in those static conceptions of the 

 organism which seem to have no relation to anything 

 else in the world and which raise many questions but 

 answer none, and being forced by my own experimental 

 investigations to conclusions very different from these, 

 I have attempted to apply dynamic conceptions to cer- 

 tain biological problems, with the results which have 

 been considered in the preceding pages. Whatever 

 other value the dynamic viewpoint may possess, it 

 serves as a basis for the synthesis and ordering of many 



