February 4, 1898.] 



SCIENCE. 



147 



the Jurassic period, the characters of which 

 are very largely seen in the Insectivora Primi- 

 iiva, or placentals of the Stonesfield Slate 

 and Purbeek periods. 



The discoveries in South Africa above 

 alluded to take us back to the still older 

 period of the origin of the Mammalia. Two 

 of the types of the Theromorphs of the Per- 

 mian and Lower Triassic, namely, the Tlie- 

 riodontia and Gomphodontia, supply many 

 of the characters which we have expected 

 to find in the ancestry of the Mammals. In 

 fact, they embrace the few osteological 

 characters placed in Haeckel's Promam- 

 malia, or Huxley's Hypotheria, as well as the 

 more numerous characters which we have 

 subsequently put into the Mammalian arche- 

 type. The Theriodontia resemble in their 

 dentition and structure the minute Froto- 

 donta described by Osborn from the Tri- 

 assic, but differ in the compound character 

 of the jawbones as well as in their sur- 

 passing size. In tooth structure they are 

 also prototypes of the Triconodonta or 

 Marsupials of the Jurassic period. On the 

 other hand, the herbivorous Gomphodontia, 

 including Tritylodon, are prototypes of the 

 great phylum of Multituberculata, which in 

 turn, upon extremely slender evidence how- 

 ever, have been associated with the Mono- 

 tremata. 



Thus while the phylogeny of the Mammalia 

 is still in a highly incomplete, speculative 

 and shifting condition, if compared with 

 the evidence we could have mustered 

 ten years ago, it marks a prodigious ad- 

 vance and is full of stimulus for the im- 

 mediate future of paleontology. 



Botany. Peofessoe Wm. Teelease, Mis- 

 souri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, Mo. 

 Though for a time I found opportunity 

 for work along ecological lines, necessity 

 has compelled me to confine my study, 

 of recent years, so closely to descriptive 

 botany that at first I felt some hesitancy 



in accepting the invitation to open this 

 discussion of the biological problems and 

 proposed methods for their solution, in 

 botany. But, on second thought, I decided 

 that I might, without impropriety, do so, 

 since I recalled the statement, heard many 

 years ago on this campus, that the ultimate 

 systematic arrangement of living things will 

 be at once an epitome of all that is known 

 of them and a key to their entire history ; 

 and I fully recognize that many of the most 

 serious problems confronting the descriptive 

 naturalist to-day are to receive their solu- 

 tion through increased knowledge of the 

 things studied as living things. In point 

 of fact, the great problem for the botanist 

 and zoologist, the problem underlying and 

 running through all others, is the problem 

 of life. 



I have seen so many vital phenomena 

 explained by normal, if complex, physical 

 laws that I may be pardoned, I trust, if at 

 the outset I state that I look at this problem 

 as a physicist and not as a vitalist, feeling 

 that, with each added physical demonstra- 

 tion given, the improbability of an extra- 

 physical answer to each unanswered ques- 

 tion becomes in an even greater degree un- 

 likely. 



That which the botanist and zoologist are 

 primarily concerned with is protoplasm. In 

 general essentials alike in animal and plant, 

 yet in detail differing in two individuals of 

 the same species, in the twin olFspring of the 

 same parent, in different organs of the same 

 organism, and seemingly in the same liv- 

 ing cell at difi'erent periods, differentiated so 

 that, at least in the vegetable kingdom, the 

 morphological unit, the cell, is yet a com- 

 plex organism, this substance represents 

 apparently a most complex and ever-chang- 

 ing mixture of most complex and unstable 

 organic compounds. 



Though the animal possesses a higher 

 specialization and a greater corresponding 

 differentiation of its cells, and though those 



