Problems of biology / [George Sandeman].

  • Sandeman, George
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Problems of biology / [George Sandeman]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    are externally held together so as to give the delusive appear- ance of a unity in difference. Everything which can be dis- tinguished from the rest, and which may exist in individuals of different species, is itself a complete thing. It, and not the organism, is the true individual. It is the unit to which biological investigation must advance. “ Even our common terminology,” says de Vries, shows that the images of all leaf forms are put together out of a comparatively small number of simpler qualities.” His meaning in this seems to be clear. To qualify an organism in such-and-such a w'ay, is to distinguish one separate thing existing among other separate things. And a true classification, if we could only get it, would be a description of these “ comparatively few factors,” supplemented by a description of their distribution among organisms. Thus redness exists in these plants, hairiness in those, and a height of six foot in those others. And such separately existing and, to physiology, accidentally combined qualities, are the real individual unities, which we must, in order to biology, dissociate from the accidental colonies in which they live in a sort of symbiosis. In a word, the abstract universal is the real unity, and the concrete universal is only a puzzling complication of our problem. And classification should not proceed by the analogical comparison of organ- isms, but by the enumeration of these abstract universals. A more subtle and insidious approach to the same necessary postulate for hypothetical systems of biology is given by Naegeli, in his great “ Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre.” He is impelled to create, since he cannot find, a sphere in which all organic qualities should be units, separate from one another, and capable of enumeration. And, when he has created it, he regards it as the true organism, of which that which we know is only the baffling and delusive appearance. I quote from the section entitled “ Idioplasm as vehicle of hereditary potential qualities (Anlagen)l D
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