The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 4

symbolism and formule that mathematical text-book. It sends inquiring spirits weary and empty away. Some passages here were first shaped in that fashion and then, when their meaning had been completely worked out, very carefully rewritten in the English language. We fought each other not indeed for compression, but for simplification and compactness. This Book 4 was at one time, we may mention, twice as long as it is at present. We hope after all this labour to have produced a story as readable as the rest of this work and certainly, we believe, more stimulating to the imagination. For the implications of these minute particulars are immense.

For a time, then, we shall set aside the great interrogations of the previous section as if they were quite open questions and give the essential facts of individual development and reproduction. It may come as a novel idea to some of our readers that sex, identified in the minds with reproduction, probably had nothing to do with it in the first place and that the two were only slowly entangled.

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CHAPTER 1

We shall then describe the minute mechanism of sexual union and inheritance. ‘The reader will follow the work of the Abbé Mendel from its modest beginnings to its broadening and developing consequences. Then, stripped of all jargon, the central concepts of Genetics will be displayed in their essential beauty and importance. Some further sections of interest about sex will follow, and then we shall take up again those notes of interrogation with which we ended the previous section.

We shall then find that we are able to estimate the factors in the evolutionary process far more surely than we are now able todo. We shall put the Neo-Lamarckian on trial and come to grips with that widespread and popular idea of an upward evolutionary urge, of which, as we have said, Professor Bergson and Mr. G. B. Shaw are perhaps the best known exponents. And then, emerging from such controversial matters, we shall treat in the next Book of the marvellous growth of the Tree of Life from its beginning.