8 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLI. No. 1044 



calls also, if less directly, Bonnet's vision 

 of "palingenesis," which dates from the 

 eighteenth century. 



We should be grateful to those who help 

 us to open our minds; and Professor 

 Bateson, as is his wont, performs this 

 difficult operation in so large and masterly 

 a fashion as to command our lively ad- 

 miration. It must be said of his pic- 

 turesque and vigorous discussion that we 

 are kept guessing how far we are expected 

 to take it seriously, or at least literally. We 

 have always a lurking suspicion that pos- 

 sibly his main purpose may after all be to 

 remind us, by an object lesson, how far we 

 still are from comprehending the nature 

 and causes of evolution, and this suspicion 

 is strengthened by the explicit statement 

 in a subsequent address, delivered at Syd- 

 ney, that our knowledge of the nature of 

 life is "altogether too slender to warrant 

 speculation on these fundamental ques- 

 tions." Let us, however, assume that we 

 are seriously asked to go further and to 

 enter the cul de sac that Professor Bateson 

 so invitingly places in our way. Once 

 within it, evidently, we are stalemated in 

 respect to the origin and early history of 

 life; but as to that, one form of total igno- 

 rance is perhaps as good as another, and we 

 can still work out how the game has been 

 played, even though we can never find out 

 how the pieces were set up. But has the day 

 so soon arrived when we must resign our- 

 selves to such an ending? Are we prepared 

 to stake so much upon the correctness of a 

 single hypothesis of allelomorphism and 

 dominance? This hypothesis — that of 

 "presence and absence" — has undoubtedly 

 been a potent instrument of investigation; 

 but there are some competent students of 

 genetics who seem to find it equally simple 

 to formulate and analyze the phenomena 

 by the use of a quite different hypothesis, 

 and one that involves no such paradoxical 

 consequences in respect to the nature of 



evolution. Are we not then invited to 

 strain at a gnat and to swallow a camel? 



But I pass over the technical basis of the 

 conception in order to look more broadly 

 at its theoretic superstructure. Is not 

 this, once again, a kind of symbolism 

 by which the endeavor is made to deal with 

 a problem that is for the present out of our 

 reach ? Neither you nor I, I dare say, will 

 hesitate to maintain that the primordial 

 Amoeba (if we may so dub the earliest of 

 our ancestors) embodied in some sense or 

 other all the potentialities, for better or for 

 worse, that are realized before us at this 

 moment in the American Association for 

 the Advancement of Science. But if we 

 ask ourselves exactly what we mean by this 

 we discover our total inability to answer in 

 more intelligible terms. We can not, it is 

 true, even if we would, conquer the temp- 

 tation now and then to spread the wings of 

 our imagination in the thin atmosphere of 

 these upper regions; and this is no doubt 

 an excellent tonic for the cerebrum pro- 

 vided we cherish no illusions as to what we 

 are about. No embryologist, for example, 

 can help puzzling over what I have called 

 the problem of the microcosm; but he 

 should be perfectly well aware that in 

 striving to picture to his imagination the 

 organization of the egg, of the embryolog- 

 ical germ, that is actually in his hands for 

 observation and experiment, he is peril- 

 ously near to the habitat of the mystic and 

 the transcendentalist. The student of evo- 

 lution is far over the frontier of that for- 

 bidden land, in any present attack upon 

 the corresponding problem of the mac- 

 rocosm; for the primordial Amoeba, the 

 evolutionary germ, is inconceivably far out 

 of our reach, hidden behind the veil of a 

 past whose beginnings lie wholly beyond 

 our ken. And why, after all, should we 

 as yet attempt the exploration of a region 

 which still remains so barren and remote? 



