RECORDS. 367 



III, of the Memoirs are in press and will be issued soon after 

 the beginning of the year. 



Respectively submitted, 

 Charles Lane Poor, 



Editor. 



THE ANNUAL ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. 



Edmund B. Wilson, The Problem of Development.^ 

 The selection of such a subject as the problem of develop- 

 ment for a general address to this Academy as a whole suggests 

 a word of explanation. Within the privacy of our sectional 

 meetings we are permitted to dig and delve as much as we 

 please among the dry bones of specialization ; but on this occa- 

 sion a righteous tradition imposes upon the president the duty 

 of laying aside his special tools in order to address the whole 

 scientific body over which he has for a time had the honor to 

 preside. In offering a brief general discussion of some latter 

 day problems of embryology and cytology I shall endeavor not 

 to violate the spirit of this tradition. The task is not an easy 

 one, owing to the complexity of the data and their strangeness 

 to those who have not closely followed the details of modern 

 biological work ; yet I am encouraged to make the attempt by 

 the belief that the problem of development belongs to those 



' The critical reader will, I hope, be willing to bear in mind the condition under 

 which this address was delivered. My endeavor was to convey to a scientific body, 

 composed only in part of biologists, some individual impressions of a student of em- 

 bryology and cytology regarding the general bearings of recent researches in his 

 special field. It was not consistent with this purpose to give a critical resume for 

 biologists, nor could authorities be cited in detail. The general conception here 

 developed will recall certain views contained in Driasch's " Analytische Theorie 

 der organischen Entwicklung," published in 1894 (themselves traceable to earlier 

 conclusions of de Vries), but afterwards rejected by him in favor of an explicit 

 theory of vitalism. The rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance, the newly produced 

 evidence, on the one hand, of morphological and physiological diversity among the 

 chromosomes ; on the other, of protoplasmic prelocalization in the egg, have, how- 

 ever, placed the whole problem in a new light. I wish to acknowledge my indebt- 

 edness to Professor Whitman's fine essays on the questions that center in Bonnet's 

 doctrines, published in the " Wood's Hole Biological Lectures," for 1893, which 

 suggested the quotation from Huxley. 



