110 VITALISM AND SCHOLASTICISM 



sets itself to work, begins to divide on its own 

 account and finally builds up a complete 

 Amphioxus. Let us consider what this means. 

 A single cell, from the eight-celled groups, 

 would under normal circumstances have con- 

 structed, one may roughly say, one-eighth of 

 the future amphioxus. It might have been 

 worked up into its tail, into one of its internal 

 organs, into a variety of portions of the body. 

 But under the aligred circumstances it is able 

 to construct and does construct an entire and 

 complete new amphioxus.* It was the con- 

 siderationToT phenomena of this kind which led 

 Driesch, one of the greatest of workers in this 

 line, to declare that the egg seemed to act like 

 an intelligent being, t And the same thing is 

 admitted by Wilson in the preface to his great 

 work$ where he says : " ' One is sometimes 

 tempted to conclude ' was recently remarked 

 by a well-known embryologist, 6 that every 

 egg is a law unto itself ! ' The jest, perhaps, 

 embodies," he continues, " more of the truth 

 than the author would seriously have main- 

 tained, expressing, as it does, a growing appre- 

 ciation of the intricacy of cell phenomena, the 

 difficulty of formulating their general aspects 



* This experiment is of great importance in connection 

 with Driesch's argument of the ** harmonious-equipotential 

 system," which will be discussed in another chapter. 



f Morgan, op. cit., p. 136. 



$ Op. cit., p. xii. 



