SECTION A PHYLOGENY 



(Hall 2, September 21, 3 p. m.) 



CHAIRMAN : PROFESSOR THOMAS HUNT MORGAN, Columbia University. 

 SPEAKERS : PROFESSOR HUGO DE VRIES, University of Amsterdam. 



PROFESSOR CHARLES O. WHITMAN, University of Chicago. 



THE Chairman of the Section of Phylogeny was Professor Thomas 

 Hunt Morgan, of Columbia University, who began the proceedings 

 of the Department with the following remarks: 



"This Section of the Congress might have been given the title of 

 evolution rather than of phylogeny; for, while phylogeny deals with 

 an historical process, the term evolution has come to-day largely 

 through the work of De Vries to include not only a study of the 

 evolution of the past, but of evolution as it is taking place around us 

 at the present time. This is not a formal distinction, but one that 

 stands for a fundamental difference of method that has the most far- 

 reaching consequences. The study of evolution as an historical ques- 

 tion must have always been unsatisfactory, for all the doubts that 

 darken the historical method would have left its conclusions dubious 

 and unconvincing. Historical evolution could never have attained to 

 the dignity of an exact science. The disrepute into which phylogene- 

 tic speculation has fallen in our own times furnishes an example of 

 what we may expect from the method. 



" When, on the other hand, the process of evolution was studied by 

 the method of experiment, a new era opened. Darwin himself used 

 extensively the experimental method, and his finest results have been 

 reached in this way. Much of the general information of the breeders 

 on which he relied, alas too often, are also the outcome of experiment, 

 but of experiments by men incapable, in many cases, of employing 

 the method with scientific precision. 



" After Darwin, little was done in this direction, although a few 

 names stand out as oases in a waste of speculation. Now once again, 

 as Bateson has remarked, 'After a weary halt of forty years we have 

 at last begun to march.' It is a pleasure as well as a great oppor- 

 tunity that we are to listen to-day to the addresses of two biologists 

 who before all others have undertaken the study of evolution on 

 a large scale by means of the experimental method. Professor 

 De Vries has studied in Europe the evolutionary process in the 

 American plant (Enothera Lamarckiana; while Professor Whitman 

 has studied in America the evolution of the European pigeons. 

 Political boundaries disappear before the advances of the sciences." 



