D.—ZOOLOGY. 109 
principles, is capable of yielding results of specific and general import- 
ance is well illustrated by the researches of Michaelsen and of Stephen- 
son on Indian Oligochetes; these authors have been able to trace the 
lines of evolution of the members of the family Megascolecide so com- 
pletely that we know their history as well as we know that of the 
Equide. Again, to take an example from a different category, the fine 
morphological work on the cell and on the nucleus and its chromosomes 
which we owe to Hertwig, Flemming, Boveri, van Beneden, Wilson 
and others, made possible the modern researches and conceptions in 
regard to inheritance and sex. The danger that morphology will be 
pushed to excess is long past; the peril seems to me to be rather in the 
opposite direction, i.e. that some of our students before passing on to 
research receive too little of that training and discipline in exact morpho- 
logy by which alone they can be brought to appreciate how the com- 
ponents of the living organism are related to one another and to those 
of allied species or genera, and how they afford, with proper handling, 
many data for the evolutionist. I plead, therefore, for the retention 
of a sound and adequate basis of morphology in our zoological courses. 
No one who engages in the study of morphological problems can 
proceed far without meeting questions which stimulate enquiry of a 
physiological nature, and, where means are available, resort to experi- 
mental procedure is the natural mode of arriving at the answer. That 
morphology is detrimental to or excludes experimental or physiological 
methods is entirely contrary to present day experience, and indeed the 
fruitfulness of the combination of morphology and physiology could 
have been amply illustrated any time during the last eighty years simply 
by reference to the work of Johannes Miller. The structure of an 
crganism must be known before its co-ordinated movements can be 
adequately appreciated—morphology must be the forerunner of 
physiology. 
Another of the basal supports of our science an appreciation of 
which, or better still a training in some branch of which, we must 
encourage is the systematic or taxonomic aspect. The student or 
graduate who is proceeding to specialise in experimental zoology or in 
genetics particularly requires a sound appreciation of the fact that the 
accurate determination of the genus and species under investigation is 
@ primary requisite for all critical work—it-is’ part of the fundamental 
data of the experiment and is essential, if for nothing else, to permit 
subsequent observers to repeat and perhaps to extend any given series 
of observations. Moreover, the systematic position of an animal is an 
expression of the final summary of its morphology and ‘its genetic 
relationships, and it is from such summaries that we lave to attempt 
in many cases—as, for example, in the Oligochetes already cited—to 
discover in a restricted group or order the probable course of evolution, 
though the method of evolution may not be ascertainable. From these 
summaries prepared by systematists issue problems for the experimental 
evolutionist and the geneticist. As Mr. Bateson has pointed out, it is 
from the systematist who has never lost the longing for the truth 
about evolution that the’ raw materials for genetical researches are to 
_ be drawn, and the separation of the laboratory men from the systematists 
imperils the work and the outlook of both. 
