ii6 THE BIOLOGY OF THE SEA-SHORE 



A widely held view is that which considers the power 

 of regeneration to have arisen in connection with liability 

 to injury. The more liable an animal is to be damaged the 

 greater would be its regenerative faculty. This view has 

 had particular support from Weismann, and also finds 

 expression in what is known as Lessona's Law, which states 

 that regeneration is most highly developed in those animals 

 and parts of animals which are most exposed to injury. 

 To us, who are dealing with the ecology of the sea-shore, 

 there is perhaps a special temptation to adopt such a view, 

 whence we could proceed with easy conscience to emphasise 

 the special features of the shore struggle which we might 

 regard as having fostered this power of regeneration, as it 

 occurs in a number of shore animals. Unfortunately 

 for such a purpose we feel too strongly the objections which 

 have been urged by Morgan (i 901) in his work on Regenera- 

 tion. We may best summarise these objections by using 

 Morgan's own words. " Our discussion," he says, " has 

 led to the conclusion that the phenomena of regeneration 

 are not processes that have been built up by the accumulation 

 of small advances in a useful direction ; that they cannot 

 be accounted for by the survival of those forms in which 

 the changes take place better than their fellows, for it is 

 often not a question of life and death whether or not the 

 process takes place, or even a question of leaving more 

 descendants. On the contrary, it seems highly probable 

 that the regeneration process is one of the fundamental 

 attributes of living things, and that we can find no explana- 

 tion of it as the outcome of the selective agency of the 

 environment. The phenomena of regeneration belong to 

 the general category of growth phenomena and as such are 

 characteristic of organisms." 



It is because we feel the force of Morgan's view that 

 regeneration pure and simple is a more or less fundamental 

 property of living matter, and is in consequence by no means 

 a specific attribute of shore animals, that we have decided 

 to leave out of account the numerous experiments on 

 regeneration which have been performed with animals such 



