174 ORIGIN OF NON-SEXUAL CHARACTERS 



tary character of man was actually present as a 

 Mendelian factor in the ancestral Amoeba, and that 

 man is merely a group of the whole complex of 

 characters allowed to produce real effects by the re- 

 moval of a host of inhibiting factors, is incredible. 

 The truth is that biological processes are not within 

 our powers of conception as those of physics and 

 chemistry are, and Bateson's hypothesis is nothing 

 but the old theory of preformation in ontogeny. 

 Just as the old embryologists conceived the adult 

 individual to be contained with all its organs to the 

 most minute details within the protoplasm of the 

 fertilised ovum or one of the gametes, so the modern 

 Mendelian, because he is unable to conceive or to 

 obtain the evidence of the gradual development of a 

 hereditary factor, conceives all the hereditary factors 

 of the whole animal kingdom packed in infinite 

 complexity within the protoplasm of the primordial 

 living cells. That man is complex and Amoeba 

 simple is merely a delusion ; the truth according to 

 Mendelism is that man is merely a fragment of the 

 complexity of the original Amoeba. 



Mendelism studies especially the heredity of char- 

 acters, and only incidentally deals with recorded 

 instances of the appearance of new forms, such as 

 the origin of a salmon-coloured variety of Primula 

 from a crimson variety. The occurrence of new 

 characters, or mutations as they are called, has 

 been specially studied by other investigators, and 

 I propose briefly to consider the two most im- 

 portant examples of such research, namely, that 

 by Professor T. H. Morgan, which deals with the 

 American fruit - fly Drosophila, and the other 

 which concerns the mutations of the genus of plants 



