310 

 Appendix. 



RECENT EXPERIMENTS IN THE CHEMICAL FERTILIZA- 

 TION OF ANIMAL EGGS. 



A Lecture delivered by T. Brallsfokd Robertson, Ph.D., D.Sc. 

 (Associate-Professor of Physiological Chemistry and Pharma- 

 cology, University of California), before the Microscopical 

 Section of the Roval Societv of South Australia, at Adelaide, 

 on Tuesday, June 28, 1910" 



During the past five years it has been my great privilege to 

 be associated with one of those men of whom a very few occur in 

 every generation, to whom it is given to lay the foundation-stones 

 •of a newer and greater and more gracious civilization, to furnish 

 us with the instruments for eliminating some of the hard and 

 ugly things of life, and to bend the forces of Nature more fully 

 to our service. Such men are the Galileos, the Newtons. the 

 Faradays, and the Darwins of their age, and such a man is my 

 friend and former chief, Professor Jacques Loeb, formerly of 

 the University of California, now of the Rockefeller Institute, 

 New York. It is not often or to many that the opportunity occurs 

 of being in the position of those who stood upon a peak in the 

 Darien and gazed with wild surmise upon the vast and hitherto 

 unsuspected realms which lay before them. We who have been 

 associated with Professor Loeb in the last few years have seen 

 unfolded to our view territories of scientific discovery, far more 

 fraught with import for our human welfare than even that great 

 sea upon which the discoverers of an earlier day gazed with such 

 prophetic awe. Perhaps it is not too much to say that all that 

 has gone before of human achievement pales into insignificance 

 beside that of penetrating the obscurity which has hitherto 

 enshrouded the most fundamental things of which we know, life, 

 and growth, and death. 



It is my privilege to-night to lead you a little way into these 

 new territories of fact and to help you to realize, however imper- 

 fectly, the vast significance which they may come to have in your 

 lives, ana which they will certainly have in the lives of those who 

 follow after. Perhaps the most fundamental phenomenon which 

 living material presents is that of growth. No matter how special 

 the function of a living cell may be, it invariably possesses the 

 capacity for growth, and its functional activity is accompanied by 

 growth. A muscle cell atrophies when not used, and by exercise 

 it grows. Even a cell of such special functions as a nerve cell, 

 which has to perform the extremely special function of conducting 

 nervous impulses, has the power of growth, and of that discon- 

 tinuous growth which we call reproduction. It therefore occurred 

 to Professor Loeb that the most fundamental phenomena he could 

 study were those of growth, and of discontinuous growth — 

 reproduction — and he accepted the task of analysing the pheno- 

 mena and the processes which underlie them. This stupendous task 

 was undertaken by him only 12 years ago, and at this present 

 date we are in a position to say definitely that at such and such a 

 stage in the development of an embryo the chemical processes 

 which occur are definitely of such and such a nature — a position 

 which is astoundingly far in advance of that almost complete 



