326 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLI. No. 1052 



meclianisni audi as it unfortunately often ia. 

 All of which is suggestive not only to those 

 who wonder why Germany, of all places, should 

 prove a relatively favorable soil for modern 

 metabiology, but to those also who ask 

 whether the vitalistic-mechanistie debate can 

 be closed. 



Quite apart from these matters, von Uex- 

 kiill's treatment of the environment, and of 

 the relations of the organism^ thereto, has dis- 

 tinctly practical interest for the experimen- 

 talist. For Driesch the environment does not 

 exist. Neither index of the two volumes on 

 the " Science and Philosophy of the Organ- 

 ism" contains the word, nor is any discussion 

 of the abode of life to be met with anywhere 

 in the seven hundred pages of dreary text. 

 Von Uexkiill, on the contrary, is all aglow for 

 the environment and its significance in the 

 interpretation of life. Nor have these differ- 

 ences been without importance for the two au- 

 thors under comparison; Driesch's reorgani- 

 zation of things biological has driven him 

 out of the very field which should have proved 

 more interesting than ever before; von Uex- 

 kiill is continuing concrete observations and 

 experiment and is pointing the way to further 

 investigation with commendable fervor. 



According to our writer, the environment of 

 a living thing acquires special biological sig- 

 nificance for us only when we discover and 

 analyze those elements that actually act upon 

 and with the organism in the normal give and 

 take of daily existence. Such elements con- 

 stitute the " Wirkungswelt." Further analy- 

 sis differentiates out of the " Wirkungswelt " 

 a " Merkwelt " which in the case of human 

 beings, and perhaps wherever else it occurs, is 

 specific for each individual. 



These terms are practically self-explana- 

 tory. Air, for instance, is distinctly in our 

 " Wirkungswelt," but may enter the " Merk- 

 welt " under special circumstances. Now von 

 Uexkiill takes the position that students of 

 behavior should limit themselves to a discov- 

 ery by experiment of markworlds, and leave 

 psychological considerations alone; brains and 

 the objects of the external world can be ex- 

 perimented with, but of psychoses we can 



know one set only. The much exploited 

 wonder-horses of Germany, the trained apea 

 that open bolted doors, ring bells and order 

 dinner, are monstrosities that have been 

 forced to respond to the human order and not 

 to normal constituents of either the horse- or 

 monkey-world. Whether they have come to 

 make these responses by trial and error, imi- 

 tation or a system of rewards and punish- 

 ments, is interesting only as a contribution to 

 the art of unnatural history. 



How the psychological difficulty is to be 

 outfianked by this manceuver is not clear. The 

 scallop's eye forms a retinal image like our 

 own, yet the scallop " sees " only movements. 

 To the specific forms, colors, sizes and the 

 thousand other traits by which we distinguish 

 one moving object from another this animal' 

 is blind. For the scallop a starfish, for us 

 without taste or smell, has a pronounced odor 

 indistinguishable from other chemical effects. 

 Three marks in the following definite order 

 (time-scheme as opposed to space-scheme') con- 

 stitute a starfish in the scallop's " Merkwelt " i 

 movement, a general chemical mark, and a 

 tactile stimulus. Given these in their orderly 

 connection and the starfish is — " wargenom- 

 men" — that is, perceived, observed, felt, talcen 

 care of, attended to, or availed of, by the scal- 

 lop. Clearly, until von UexkiiU furnishes us 

 with a system of notation by which the re- 

 sults of his experiments can be described with- 

 out using words that suggest to every one the 

 very thing upon which he has turned his back, 

 discoveries concerning the markworld of the 

 scallop are not likely to free us from the diffi- 

 culties of an unanswerable question. 



This does not mean that the method is in- 

 applicable to cases in which the psycholog- 

 ical question is respectable. On the contrary, 

 James, in his essay " On a Certain Blindness 

 in Human Beings," placed emphasis on the 

 same spot fifteen years ago. In comparative 

 psychology, and especially in experimental 

 studies on human behavior, on the practise of 

 education, and on the art of right living, nu- 

 merous applications suggest themselves. If 

 students adequately trained in the methods of 

 science wiU seriously take up the experimental 



