194 
J. Bretland Farmer. 
its main outlines are to be permanent or not. It has paved the way 
for subsequent investigators and the fields thus opened up have 
proved rich indeed. 
In a much more limited degree the efforts made to render the 
facts of organisation comprehensible have also borne fruit. But 
the ground is far less secure. The methods of analysis that can be 
utilised in statistical enquiries are less available here because the 
very factors that go to make up the whole are so dimly apprehended. 
Chemistry and physics at present render but relatively little 
assistance, and we have to trust largely to analogy, a notoriously 
unsafe guide. But unless we strive, notwithstanding, to express 
the results of our imperfect analysis in terms of things we can 
understand, we shall never make any advance at all. It is better to 
try, even if we fall into error, than to pass the whole subject by on 
the other side. A faulty and incomplete hypothesis is infinitely 
better than none at all, it at least awakes criticism, and everyone 
has plenty of the kind of friends who are anxious to detect and 
expose his errors. No harm, then, can come from an attempt to 
get a point of view—to deal hypothetically—I will not say theo¬ 
retically, that would imply too much—with the main factors that 
determine those more obvious features of living beings that we call 
organisation and development. And in considering a matter of this 
kind, I do not propose to discuss critically the work of individual 
writers who have occupied themselves with this theme. The names 
of several will at once occur to you, and their views are not easily 
reconciled. Quot homines tot sententiae ; and it would be tedious 
to those unacquainted with the literature and superfluous for those 
that are, were I to attempt to deal with it. I will only therefore 
remind you that the various opinions are roughly divisible into two 
classes, the one depending on the assumption that there are 
formative stuffs present in the organism, that determine the pro¬ 
duction of its different parts, as root, shoot, and flower-forming 
stuff, and the like; while the other postulates the existence of a 
mysterious quality “ polarity,” and this property is regarded as 
determining the genesis and the appropriate distribution of the 
various parts. 
Perhaps there is an element of truth in both of these views, 
but each one tested separately eludes one just at the critical point, 
and is apt to resolve itself merely into a round-about statement of 
the facts. The material theory invokes a dens ex machina. that is 
difficult to grasp, whilst the second is too idealistic to admit of 
