146 BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



probable penalty of neglecting this is failure in the attainment 

 of theoretically correct opinions, either through absence of data 

 that can be gathered only in this way or by the misleading 

 nature of the unclassified positive evidence. 



Another direction in which legitimate criticism can be made 

 of many modern researches has still more fundamental meaning. 



Cope always insisted upon the necessity of regarding the 

 immediate reactions of the organism as the proximal cause of 

 modifications. One cannot read his masterly analysis of the 

 phenomena of Bathmism in the American Naturalist for 1893, 

 under the head of "The Energy of Evolution," without realiz- 

 ing that he is accurately translating the two categories of the 

 obvious phenomena of evolution in the following passages : 



" The term * energy ' is used to express the motion of matter, 

 and the building of an embryo to maturity is evidently accom- 

 plished by the movement of matter in certain definite direc- 

 tions." Then, after stating the wide differences between this 

 sort of energy, so far as it can be estimated by its results, 

 and other sorts of energy, known by their physical results 

 upon inorganisms, he divides the organic results into two 

 classes. "The anagenetic class tends to upward progress in 

 the organic sense, that is, towards the increasing control of 

 its environment by the organism, and towards the origin and 

 development of consciousness and mind. The catagenetic 

 energies tend to the creation of a stable equilibrium of mat- 

 ter in which molar motion is not produced from within, and 

 sensation is impossible. In popular language one class of 

 energies tends to life, the other to death." 



The term "Catagenesis" is to me objectionable, and para- 

 genesis would be better ; but leaving this aside, Cope has hit 

 the exact explanation of the cycle in the ontogeny and phy- 

 logeny, and given us a true, broad picture in these few words 

 of the phenomena of life, and made plain that it is distinct 

 from inorganic phenomena because it possesses internal factors 

 that are the direct and immediate causes of modifications. 



How many biologists keep constantly in mind this double 

 relationship of an organism to its surroundings, and the possi- 

 bility that most morphic modifications are complex phenomena, 



