Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/257

 THE ZOOLOGY OF TO-DAY 251

ask in response to what do they change? Are the changes natural phe- nomena throughout and^ as such^ due to natural causes, like the up and down heaving of the earth's crust?

We are confronted to-day, as in past times, with two interpretations of nature. On the one side argument, clad in the robe of philosophy, would lead us beyond the border of the phenomenal world, seeking a reality on which all phenomena are dependent. Many tell us there is such a reality — ^and certainly nothing that we know contradicts them. On the other hand, the obvious world is a world of natural phenomena, which, although at bottom incomprehensible, prove on study to be or- derly and predictable. That is, we learn through experience that one occurrence is associated with another, that one change brings about the next, that for every effect there is a cause.

Beturning to our question, it may be said that we work and work successfully on the theory that the changes which organisms undergo are natural phenomena brought about, like any others, by natural causes. The transformation of a horde of barbarians into a modern European nation; the immunity which a race acquires against specific disease; the evolution of new breeds of dogs, horses and wheat; the spreading of a race over a wide and varied area with the consequent appearance of differences which mark off the group into geographical subgroups; the gradual loss of parts of the body, so obvious in some fossil series; the metamorphosis of a part into what is virtually a new organ ; the restriction of a species to a narrow area of distribution, with the final outcome, extinction; all these we are justified in regarding as natural phenomena and as phases in the wave of change that incessantly passes over living nature.

Granted the fact of change and that it is a natural phenomenon, we become interested in the analysis of its causes. And so we begin to inquire into the origin and accentuation of the small differences which mark off a race from the parent stock. Thus we pass from the wider study of evolution to the narrower and more precise study of heredity and variation. Here the experimental method is the chief one em- ployed, although often under the guidance of comparison and statistics.

I pass over the ideas entertained as to ways in which differences are accentuated and touch, in preference, on some of the ways in which they originate. We know very well that the body of an animal, its skin, bones, muscles, etc., made up of infinite numbers of microscopic com- ponents, the cells, responds to changes in exercise, food and environ- ment with the production of differences which are often very well marked. But we also know that the great bulk of the obvious and familiar differences so caused are not passed on to the next generation. They are not heritable. In order to be heritable, the peculiarity must be lodged, potentially, of course, in the germ cells. These are the cells^

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