Evolution Reversed. — Dr. William Bateson. president 

 of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 

 intimates that our ideas of evolution need a rearrangement. In 

 his Presidential Address he suggests that instead of evolution 

 in general moving from the simple to the complex, that- it may 

 be just the other way about. Usually we have assumed the 

 appearance of a new characteristic in plants or animals to be 

 developed dc novo to fit the conditions tO' be met, but Bateson's 

 work in plant breeding has convinced him that no character 

 can arise that was not latent in the cell from the beginning. If a 

 new color appears in a flower, for instance, he explains it by 

 the loss of some character that caused the normal color or by 

 the appearance of a color factor that has previously lain dor- 

 mant in the plant. So with other characters. All are regarded 

 as existing in the cell and produced or suppressed as circum- 

 stances determine. Some characters he supposes to originate 

 by fractionation' of the original characters or by a rearrange- 

 ment of such characters. To illustrate this he cites the case of 

 the sweet pea which consists of a single purple-and-white 

 flowered species that up to the present it has been impossible 

 to cross wnth any other plant ; and yet breeding has produced a 

 most remarkable series of colors in the flowers. Similar con- 

 ditions as to color, size, and flavor exist in our various apples 

 which are regarded as the descendants of a single wild species. 

 All the different forms are supposed by Bateson to be due to 

 the loss of some cleterrant factor. The old evolution explains 

 such cases by the reverse of this process ; that is, each new form 

 was assumed to be due to the gain of some clraracter. Dar- 



