Stimulus & Mechanism as Factors in Organisation. 225 
characters severally diagnostic of the ancestors reappear, not as 
a blend of the two, but as segregated patterns, it seems 
impossible to escape the conviction that a segregation of material 
substance has correspondingly occurred, and that this, by virtue of 
its peculiar composition, expresses itself in a repetition of the 
respective parental forms, and the dominance of one parent, which 
may completely obscure the existence of the material substratum of 
the other, though this lies still latent within the body, is not opposed 
to, but rather falls in with such a material conception. And again 
the remarkable numerical relationships observed in those hybrids 
that conform to Mendel’s rules, seem hardly explicable, save from 
the same standpoint. 
In the foregoing attempt at a rough anaylsis of what I conceive 
to be the main factors that combine to produce organic form, I am 
far from pretending that much of what I have urged is novel, and I 
am fully aware that most of the rest is merely of the nature of 
hypothesis, but at least it seemed to me that another effort to try 
and realise how organic form may be regarded as a necessary out¬ 
come of the combination of matter and force, without reference to 
any teleological considerations of use or the reverse, might not be 
quite out of place, for current literature still teems with teleological 
explanations that really explain nothing, but rather bar the 
way of scientific enquiry. We may be, and probably are, far from the 
time when rigorous analysis of form shall be possible, but that such 
a time will come I have not the slightest doubt, and my conviction 
that the clue to the solution of the problems of organisation will 
be along the path of chemistry and physics must be the excuse for 
the tentative views, oftentimes vague as they are, that I have 
ventured to put before you to-day. 
