Professor Duns on the Elements of Organisms. 117 



The following conimunicatious were read : 



I. The Elements of Organisms. By Professor Duns. 



The author had seen, with much regret, naturalists leaving 

 the old starting-point of observation and research, and, instead 

 of allowing living forms to record their own history, making 

 a history for them. The older and, as he thought, the wiser 

 observers began with mature organisms, finding in them per- 

 manent specific marks, and from that point of view they 

 studied their developmental history. It is only in poetry that 

 the child is '' father of the man." The apparently common- 

 place remark could not be too earnestly repeated, namely, that 

 they could have no true and definite knowledge of the embryo 

 apart from the parent, or of the seed apart from the plant 

 which bore it. The whole tendency, however, of recent 

 research in biology was to assign uncertainty to specific marks 

 in mature forms, and to magnify the importance of a know- 

 ledge of constituents and beginnings; in a word, to subject 

 biology, in which there was the all-important factor " life," 

 whose nature was still unknown, to the methods of chemistry, 

 in which uncertainty has no place. After criticising the 

 introductory positions laid down by Herbert Spencer in his 

 book on the " Principles of Biology," the general conclusions 

 of the paper were given as follows : (1.) That ultimate ele- 

 ments being sub-sensible, the biologist is indebted to belief 

 where observation is impossible for a starting-point in order 

 to observe ; (2.) That thus the leading principle of positivism 

 is absurd, because while it claims to limit itself to observation, 

 it is forced to assume as a starting-point that which no man 

 has ever observed ; (3.) While it is granted that the elements 

 of organisms carry with them their essential qualities into 

 compounds, there is nothing to show that these are not modi- 

 fied by "this association; (4.) That, truly interpreted, the 

 behaviour of these elements in compounds affords no favour 

 to the theory of organic evolution ; (5.) That life neutralises 

 tendencies to specific change in organisms when these ten- 

 dencies come into play, and ever acts in directions antagonistic 

 to evolution. 



VOL. IV. Q 



