SECTION D.—ZOOLOGY. 
~ CONSTRUCTION AND CONTROL IN 
ANIMAL LIFE. 
ADDRESS BY 
; PROFESSOR F. W. GAMBLE, D.Sc., F.R.S., 
' PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
‘* But what was the creature like?” Iasked. ‘“‘ What like was 
it? Gude forbid that we suld ken what like it was! It hada 
kind of a heid wpon it—man could say nae matr.” ’ 
R. L. 8.—The Merry Men. 
Ir I were asked to point out the main change in zoological thought since 
the last meeting of this Association in Canada, I should venture to say that 
zoological problems have become problems of control, and that control, 
from implying mere restraint, has come to mean ‘ quickening.’ The being, 
well-being, and becoming of the animal in its world are no longer problems 
of statics, but of dynamics. The fabric of the animal body characterised 
_by those traits and that orderliness that are revealed by genetic analysis 
is no longer regarded only as a link in the chain of organic affiliation, nor 
as a fact simply, but as the balanced result of controlled becoming or 
development. The factorial hypothesis and its corollaries convey this 
ay, strongly. The results of ecological analysis, meagre as they 
, 
4 
are as yet, point to the same conclusion. Experimental morphology may 
be summed up in the word ‘ regulation.’ Animal physiology shows the 
same dominant tendency. The results of tissue-culture show the existence 
of a process which enriches the body by enforcing it. The infinitely varied 
animal fabric appears to be the exquisitely balanced individual expression. 
of processes that quicken and restrain. 
This change from the older thought of the animal, as a mellowed, 
balanced product of changes under stress, has come from the renewed hope 
of understanding the natural problem in the new light of experimental 
analysis. If to succeed is to come up from below, the actual animal life 
that succeeds must be but a fraction of the submerged recessive life that 
"experiment reveals. These recessives when artificially bred are no mere 
eripples, nor disconnected with the evolution of normals. They show us 
‘something of the depths of animal nature, and help us to realise that but 
for the grace of organic regulation we should be even as they. But the 
study of such amalysis as a branch of zoology leads to an even more striking 
result. Not only does it reveal the existence of these sub-normals, but 
also it accounts for the defection of certain expected offspring. There 
are non-viable combinations of living substances. These entering the egg 
that should by expectation produce a male, render the egg incapable of 
sad 
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