4 Professor J. Arthur Thomson on Many Inventions, &c. 



de])artures more or less consistent with the past. (2) These 

 new departnres, nsiially improvements on previous new departures, 

 find expression in the structure and function of the embodied 

 organism — the player, into whose hands the germinal cards are 

 put. It is for the embodied or explicit organism, mind-body and 

 bod.y-mind in one, to play these cards, to test their worth, even 

 to find the environing conditions where they will be of most 

 avail. Unprofitable tentatives, coming from the implicit organism 

 (the germ cell) will prove fatal in the experience of the explicit 

 or emljodied organism (the animal) and that will be an end of 

 them. But when variations or mutations on the inclined plane 

 of behaviour (and of course its subjective or psychical side) prove 

 profitable when tested by the individual creature, then they will 

 bring success which is likely to mean their entailment, for the 

 heritability of many germinal novelties is now certain. 



" It is in this way that the lower animals have profited by 

 inborn insi)irations never clearly thought out, and just as it may 

 have taken a million years to fashion the feathers of birds, so it 

 may have taken ten millions to endow the tribe of ants with 

 their marvellous repertory of apparent inventions." (From 

 " More Secrets of Animal Life," unpublished). 



A hearty vote of thanks was accorded Professor Thomson, 

 on the motion of Councillor PI J. Elliott, seconded by Mr. Henry 

 Pviddell, M.E. 



