

[Reprinted from THE AMERICAN NATURALIST, Vol. XLVIL, Feb., 1913. J 



ADAPTATION FEOM THE POINT OF VIEW OF 

 THE PHYSIOLOGIST 1 



PROFESSOR ALBERT P. MATHEWS 



THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 



I FEEL much ashamed in having to expose my intellec- 

 tual nakedness before the members of this society. When 

 I came to this meeting I supposed that adaptation, or the 

 fitness of organisms to their environments, was a physio- 

 logical truism ; that fishes were fitted by their structures 

 and functions to a life in the water ; that frogs were so 

 constituted that they could live either on land or in water ; 

 and I was even so ignorant as to believe that many struc- 

 tures of a bird's body adapted it to flight. But it appears 

 from the paper of one of my colleagues that in all of these 

 things I was most woefully mistaken. 



I feel some hesitation, also, in appearing before a 

 society composed largely of American students of genet- 

 ics, for I have no new and confusing terminology to pro- 

 pose; and owing to my ignorance of the language they 

 speak and of the short-hand symbols sometimes employed, 

 I am, perforce, compelled to speak in ordinary English 

 which may be understood by any one ; all of which, I fear, 

 must invest all I have to say with an air of superficiality, 

 or even of simplicity. I am besides a confirmed con- 

 servative in the matter of evolution, holding fast to the 

 explanation of adaptation given by Darwin of natural 

 selection of small variations; having little or no con- 

 fidence that genes, unit characters, mutations, saltations, 

 allelomorphs, determiners, inhibitors, dominants and re- 

 cessives, genotyes and phenotyes, are anything more than 

 ghosts, without substance ; and looking always for simple 

 explanations of a physical and chemical kind, capable of 



1 Bead at the Symposium on Adaptation at the meeting of the American 

 Society of Naturalists, Cleveland, January 2, 1913. 



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