902 



SCIEXCE 



[S. 



\OL.XXS.iy. Xo. SS7 



maiTels wliieli will require the iitmost pow- 

 ers of our inteUeet to grasp. 



A. A. M^iCHEUSOX 



UXIVEKSITT OF CHICAGO 



AMEHIC jy SOCIETY OF XATrSALISIS 

 HESEPITT ASP PEHSOXALIIT^ 



The fatliei"s of the American Society of 

 Xaturalists in their wisdom made the pres- 

 ident's address an after dinner speech. 

 "What can they have meant by that, save 

 to free him from the shackles of that rigor- 

 ously scientific procedure which marks our 

 day-light program, to enable him to speak 

 in lighter vein, to discourse of things that 

 as a technical scientist he can not touch: 

 in short, to invite him to leave the solid 

 ground of science, and. following the mod- 

 ern vogue, circle aboiit a bit in the at- 

 mosphere above? 



And so. in accordance with their pru- 

 dent provision. I shall neither present to 

 you resiilts of my own experimentation. 

 nor indulge in that favorite present-day 

 pastime of geneticists, so facile when one 

 is far from the material itself, of demon- 

 strating that the experiments of some one 

 else prove just the opposite of what he 

 supposed them to pi"ove. There lacks, alas ! 

 no opportunity- for disputation in that part 

 of genetics where I am at work, but the 

 problem of pure lines and selection has 

 been at this meeting of the society in more 

 competent hands than my own. and it now 

 needs, not more argument or exposition, 

 but further investigations that shall fulfil 

 the demands of both sides — the analytical 

 experimentation of the pure line worker, 

 the anah-tical computation of the statis- 

 tical school — ^till the two come to some tini- 

 fied result. 



So. turning aside from all this. I shall 

 put forth some reflections on the relation 



' PresideBtial address before the American So- 

 cietT of Xataralists. December 2S. 1911. 



of our knowledge of genetics to certain 

 human problems. "VTe ourselves are sam- 

 ples of the material whose rules of action 

 we seek in studying genetics, and one 

 can't help thinking of the bearing of the 

 rules we discover on some of the more inti- 

 mate questions of human life — even though 

 these reflections may lead nowhere and 

 justify no practical conclusions. Consid- 

 erations of such a sort are forbidden 

 ground to the man of science in his techni- 

 cal role : yet the human being, even though 

 he has been through the scientific miU. is 

 attracted by the forbidden, particularly 

 as an after dinner diversion. "We spend 

 ottr time searching for the practical appli- 

 cations of genetics: it may be a rest from 

 the strain to dally a few moments with the 

 unpractical aspects. I judge that it is 

 clear that what I have to say wiU have no 

 relation to etigenics. 



Genetics is that part of science which 

 deals with the question of how living 

 things have come to be what they are. and 

 with what is to become of them lat^r. Now, 

 these are questions that have long troubled 

 the minds of the living things that make 

 up mankind, with relation to themselves. 

 Shall we lay ourselves open to the charge 

 of audacity, of presumption, even of im- 

 piety, if then we try to bring the pro'b- 

 lems of the origin and fate of htunan indi- 

 viditals into relation with the science of 

 genetics? Following the admonition of 

 America's philosopher, that we shall do 

 what we are afraid to do. let us venture. 



It is popularly held that in the last 

 twenty years genetics has begun to be a 

 science. "We seem at last to have gotten 

 hold of some of the threads by which the 

 web unravels, and if the unraveling has 

 not yet gone far. we at least see that the 

 process works: that we make progress at 

 it. It is perhaps no longer an adequate 

 statement of ottr knowledge to say, as a 

 French author did some years ago: 



