THE CONCEPT OF EVOLUTION 365 



ism works on a compound interest principle; especially in 

 its mental aspect it is made as well as born. And what is 

 true of an explicit individual that he makes experiments in 

 self-expression may be true for aught we know of those 

 implicit, telescoped-down individualities which we call germ- 

 cells. In any case, we see no reason to part with the 

 idea of the full-grown organism as an agent that shares in 

 its own evolution. 



In so far as Professor Bateson's view is just a paradoxical 

 way of saying that there is nothing evolved which was not, in 

 kind, originally involved; that there is nothing of lasting 

 value in the end which was not present, in kind, in the begin- 

 ning, we have no fault to find with it, provided it be clearly 

 recognised that it necessitates the assumption that the ances- 

 tral creatures had the primordia of mental as well as of 

 bodily organisation. If we ourselves are asked to state 

 how we conceive that the Primordials did embody all the 

 promise and potency of, say, bee-kind, or bird-kind, or man- 

 kind, we cannot answer, except by suggesting that the ques- 

 tion is not rightly put. What the Primordials embodied 

 was the next stage in the Systcma Naturae. 



But if Mr. Bateson's view implies that the apparent or- 

 igin of the new is illusory, that creative evolution 

 is a fiction, that evolution means unfolding (evolutio) not 

 new-formation (epigenesis), it does not seem to us to be in 

 accordance with the facts. 



In the study of individual development embryologists 

 have to do with the emergence of the obviously complex from 

 the apparently simple. We mean by apparently simple that 

 the egg has no organs or tissues or the like, but all the modern 

 work on germ-cells points to the conclusion that for each 

 distinct feature in the adult there is in the germ-cell a 



