June 23, 11-05.] 



SCIENCE. 



959 



' LIFE AND CHEMISTRY.' 



To THE Editor of Science : The interesting 

 address of Professor Charles Baskerville, en- 

 titled ' Life and Chemistry,' published in 

 Science, Vol. XXL, No. 539, contains a state- 

 ment which calls for review. He says that 

 " Seed, one of the means of nature's reproduc- 

 tion, may remain years, centuries, in vaults, 

 as within the Egj^tian pyramids. When sub- 

 jected to the proper conditions, they sprout 

 and reproduce." What are the ' proper condi- 

 tions ' for the germination of these mummy 

 seeds? DeCandolle, and others, experimented 

 with seeds in many ways, and were unable to 

 prove that they possessed such remarkable 

 longevity as that referred to in Professor 

 Baskerville's address. Their germinating ex- 

 periments indicated that few seeds retained 

 their ' vitality ' after ten to fifteen years. 

 They appeared to believe that thirty years was 

 the limit of longevity in the most vigorous 

 seeds. 



Seeds collected from mummy cases, and re- 

 ported to have germinated, are regarded by 

 many botanists as ' salted.' This view re- 

 garding the short longevity of seeds is current 

 in botanical literature. If that literature is 

 incorrect it should be revised. 



M. A. Brannon. 



SPECIAL ARTICLES. 



THE IDEAS AND TERMS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHICAL 

 ANATOMY.* 



The ideas of philosophical anatomy have 

 been developed during three periods of human 

 thought: First, the Greek, in which adapta- 

 tion was clearly perceived as the central phe- 

 nomenon of life, in its morphological and 

 physiological expression. Second, the pre- 

 Darwinian period, in which ideas of the 

 environmental relations were developed espe- 

 cially by Bacon; and various forms of mor- 

 phological, physiological and especially psy- 

 chical adaptation were developed gradually 

 through the studies of Buffon, Lamarck, Geof- 

 frey, St. Hilaire and more especially Goethe; 



* Presented before the New York Academy of 

 Sciences, by Henry Fairfield Osborn, April 10, 

 190.5. 



adaptations began to be distinguished broadly 

 into primary, or those which had been of use 

 in past time, and secondary, or those which 

 were recent in origin and in full use at the 

 present time. Even prior to these writers, 

 however, Vesalius in his studies of human an- 

 atomy perceived the importance of this dis- 

 tinction. Philosophical anatomy really owes 

 to Darwin himself the fundamental ideas 

 which are involved in the terms primitive, 

 retrogressive, progressive and dominant, and 

 are now understood with perfect clearness. 

 This is the third period of anatomy as estab- 

 lished on evolution. Huxley in his brilliant 

 essay of 1880 on ' The Laws of Evolution as 

 Applied to the Mammalia ' was the first to 

 emphasize persistent primitive characters and 

 modernized or adaptive characters, laying 

 great stress on the importance of the former 

 in questions of phylogeny. Among many 

 other anatomical papers E. Kay Lankester's 

 ' Degeneration, a Chapter in Darwinism,' 

 brought out especially the significance of ret- 

 rogressive changes. 



Huxley was a master of logic, but even his 

 keen vision failed to recognize the vast im- 

 portance of the element of analogy, or sim- 

 ilarity of function, in bringing about a sim- 

 ilarity of structure in evolution independent 

 of real similarity of kinship. This final phase 

 broad extension of paleontology, and the dem- 

 onstration over and over again in nature that 

 similar forms have been produced indepen- 

 dently either by parallelism from animals 

 related in ancestry, or by convergence in 

 animals unrelated in ancestry. To these 

 processes and results of similar modeling 

 Lankester has applied the fitting terms homo- 

 plasy and homoplastic. 



In the table an attempt is made, for the first 

 time to my knowledge, to bring together all 

 these processes of change and to indicate their 

 interrelations. There can be little disagree- 

 ment as to the terms in columns I., II., III., 

 but some surprise may be felt as to the broad 

 inclusiveness of column IV. The justification 

 for this column lies in the fact that in the 

 analysis of any animal form the questions 

 which each anatomist should put to himself 

 as regards each character are : Is this a primi- 



