No. 545] 



ORIGIN OF UNIT CHARACTERS 



•277 



The principle of pre-determination, which results in 

 the appearance of rectigradations, involves us in radical 

 opposition to the opinions of the Bateson-DeVries- 

 Johannsen school. There is an unknown law operating 

 in the genesis of many new characters and entirely dis- 

 tinct from any form of indirect law which would spring 

 out of the selection of the lawful from the lawless. This 

 great wedge between the "law" and the " chance" con- 

 ception, which since the time of Aristotle has divided 

 biologists into two schools of opinion, is driven home by 

 modern paleontology. 



Paleontology, in the origin of certain new characters 

 at least, compels us to support the truly marvelous phil- 

 osophic opinion of Aristotle, namely: 



Nature produces those things which, being continu- 

 ously moved by a certain principle contained in them- 

 selves arrive at a certain end. 



While recent biology has tended to sharply distin- 

 guish bodily from germinal processes and to place chief 

 emphasis upon evolution appearing to originate in the 

 germ cells, we must not forget that for a hundred million 

 years or more,, or from the beginning of life, the germ 

 plasm has had both its immediate somatic and its more 

 remote environmental influences. Because the grosser 

 form of Lamarckian interpretation of transmission of 

 acquired characters has apparently been disproved, we 

 must not exclude the possibility of the discovery of finer, 

 more subtle relations between the germ plasm and the 

 soma, as well as the external environment. There are 

 several phenomena, which have been observed only in 

 paleontology, that afford evidence for the existence ot 

 such a nexus; because it appears that certain germinal 

 predispositions to the formation of new characters, con- 

 nected, as Darwin conjectured, in some way with com- 

 munity of descent, are only evoked under certain so- 

 matic and environmental conditions, without which they 

 appear to lie in a latent, potential or unexpressed form. 

 All that we may be able to observe are the modes of 



