REPRODUCTION 69 



may roughly say, one-eighth of the future amphi- 

 oxus. 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 altered cir- 

 cumstances it is able to construct and does con- 

 struct an entire and complete new amphioxus. It 

 was the consideration of 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. 1 And the same thing is 

 admitted by Wilson in the preface to his great 

 work 2 where he says : " ' One is sometimes tempted 

 to conclude ' was recently remarked by a well-known 

 embryologist, ' that every egg is a law unto itself ! ' 

 The jest, perhaps, embodies," he continues, " more 

 of the truth than the author would seriously have 

 maintained, expressing, as it does, a growing ap- 

 preciation of the intricacy of cell phenomena, the 

 difficulty of formulating their general aspects in 

 simple terms, the inadequacy of some of the working 

 hypotheses that have been our guides." 



The facts of development and the observations 

 which are due to the labours of the experimental 

 embryologists present us with a picture wholly 

 different from that afforded by a contemplation of 

 the processes of inanimate bodies and it is the con- 



1 Morgan, op. cit. t p. 136. 



2 Op. cit., p. xii. 



