8 ADAPTATION AND DISEASE 



complexity enough to produce the divers types of life. But 

 is it easier to imagine that these powers could have been con- 

 veyed by extrinsic additions ? Of what nature could these 

 additions be ? Additions of material cannot surely be in question " 

 (the italics are mine). . . . And he winds up : 



" In spite of seeming perversity, therefore, we have to admit 

 that there is no evolutionary change which in the present state 

 of our knowledge we can positively declare to be not due to 

 loss." 



Now Professor Bateson is scarce a believer in the multiple 

 origin of animal and plant forms : we know, indeed, that years 

 ago he traced man and all vertebrate forms from the inverte- 

 brates through an out-of-the-way animal, Balanoglossus, and 

 incidentally in his Melbourne address he mentions this solution 

 of the problem only to reject it ; wherefore, pushed to its logical 

 conclusion, the Batesonian doctrine means this, that the primal 

 unit, or units, of protoplasm from which all living animal and 

 plant forms have descended possessed within them in a latent 

 form the " Anlagen," or, not to be beholden to our enemies, 

 the originals, of every organ and distinctive portion of an organ 

 or part, even down to the conformation and coloration of in- 

 dividual hairs and scales, and feathers and leaves, and petals 

 and stamens, of all the manifold forms of life subsequently 

 derived therefrom : that which was to outward seeming the 

 most simple form of life was, verily, in constitution the most 

 marvellously complex and that actually what we regard as 

 the higher forms of life are the lower, owing their development 

 not to progressive accretions of properties, but to the reverse, 

 so that reversion, instead of being a degenerative manifestation, 

 a loss of properties acquired by the species, is, on the contrary, 

 a recovery of higher and completer powers. Did ever any 

 exercise of mediaeval scholasticism lead to more perverse con- 

 clusion? 



The truth seems to be that Professor Bateson and the Men- 

 delians, so far as regards the problems of evolution, are working 

 in a cul-de-sac. Valuable and fascinating as are their observa- 

 tions for the establishment and amplification of the law dis- 

 covered by Gregor Mendel of cross-breeding of members of a 

 species, that law only deals with the interplay of allelomorphs, 

 id est, with the combinations and permutations of what for 



