
1890.] Embryology. QI 
greater part develop as double and variously deformed monsters. 
Such monstrous and worthless broods of larval salmon, which were 
doubtless the result of careless or ignorant treatment of the ova, I have 
myself seen. The same or similar facts are known to intelligent 
breeders of domesticated birds and fowls. And to this evidence it 
may be added that such monstrosities occur during development 
amongst invertebrates in a state of nature, as I have repeatedly ob- 
served in the case of the American lobster. The liability to deformities 
so produced is also known to diminish as development advances, thus 
firmly establishing, on the basis of fact, the view for which I contend. 
This also supports my conclusion, previously noted elsewhere, that the 
divergence of species must be studied from the stand-point that the 
tendency toward variation and divergence is most pronounced in the 
egg, and not in the adult, and in response to adaptive requirements to 
which the adult organism cannot so directly respond. This view 
further involves the conclusion that widely distinct forms, perhaps 
even phyla, have been directly evolved from the morula and planula 
stages as consequences of the greater capacity for direct adaptation 
by germs in these stages, and that the earlier phases of seg- 
mentation are consequently far more significant than the later and 
more highly modified larval stages, all of which must be regarded as 
more or less directly adaptive, as a study of their structures and meta- 
morphoses in relation to their surroundings renders self-evident, since 
many of them possess features which cannot be shown to have ever 
been of the least use to any conceivable ancestral form of the adult, 
as, for example, the placenta, amnion, and allantois, which are striking 
illustrations of this truth. 
The father of modern transformism, Lamarck, was also one of the first 
to appreciate the significance of that foundation principle of modern 
physiology, which was named metabolism by Theodore Schwann. 
The further consequences of the differentiation of metabolic processes, 
pari passu with hological differentiation were traced and elaborated 
as we have already seen by two great masters in biology, namely H. 
Milne-Edwards and Huxley, and it has b ught to sh her 
consideration of the capabilities of metabolism indicates that it may 
become the foundation of an intelligible hypothesis of heredity, 
which takes as its logically necessary basis the assumption that there is 
no scientific warrant for the belief in the isolation of the germinal 
matter of living bodies in such wise that it is out of the range of the 
influence of the effects of the physiological activity of the whole 
parent organism. This must be so on the ground of the universality 


