LIGHT, LUMINARIES AND LIFE. 197 
of a beginning,” which is involved in every variation favourable 
to advance. The early stage of adaptation, to which Starling 
refer sin the case of the Calenterata, may well be the bevinning 
of an evolutionary process, which attained its minimum in the 
Cephalopoda, where we witness an extraordinary blunting-off of 
that process at the close of the Mesozoic Age in the extinction 
of the Ammonitide and the Lelemnitide, leaving the cuttle-fish 
and the nautilus to represent the narrowed-duwn development 
of the series in modern seas ; the whole of that evolution lying, 
it would appear, quite outside that which is beginning to appear 
from the researches of Dr. Gaskell* (to which Dr. Smith 
Woodwardt has drawn attention) to have proceeded in quite 
another line through the Arthropoda. 
On the one line, it seems, that brain is the fundamental basis of 
development, on the other stomach, with their respective functions 
predominating in the one case or the other. The Darwinian 
guess about the Ascidian or the 7’wnicatu seems to fall through. 
Dr. Starling’s treatment of the subject seems to clash very 
seriously with the scientific romancing of Dr. F, Darwin about 
“Memory in Plants,” a year or two before, in his Address to 
the Botanical Section. More sane are the remarks of the President 
of the Queckett Microscopical Club in May last.t After referring 
to Kant’s confession of awe at the contemplation of “the starry 
heavens ” without us and the “moral law” within us, Professor 
Minchin recognizes a third source of “wonder in the contem- 
plation of the simplest living things, as revealed by the 
microscope, in the combination of apparent simplicity with 
infinitive complexity, and of extreme minuteness with the 
most extraordinary powers.” In an ameeba (¢g.) we see “a, 
minute creature without definite parts or organs, which never- 
theless exercises all the functions of /7e, and exhibits the germ 
of every faculty which we possess.’ What, again, he asks, “can 
be more wonderful to contemplate than that peculiarities in the 
complex mental endowment and physical structure of a human 
being can be transmitted from one generation to the next 
through the medium of a spermatozoon, the tiniest cell in the 
human body, in which the microscope reveals only a structure 
of the simplest kind ?” 
So it remains that where people, whose science consists in 
the manipulation of scientific phraseology (with more or less 
* Nature, May 13th, 1909. 
+ Address to Section C (Geology), Winnipeg Meeting, 1909. 
t See Nature of that date. 
