In his Presidential Address to the meeting of the British Association in Australia, 1914, Bateson explains his suggestion somewhat more fully with a command of language which is scarcely less remarkable than the subject matter. The more true-breeding forms are studied the more difficult it is to understand how they can vary, how a variation can arise. When two forms of _Antirrhinum_ are crossed there is in the second generation such a profusion of different combinations of the factors in the two grandparents, that Lotsy has suggested that all variations may be due to crossing. Bateson does not agree with this. He believes that genetic factors are not permanent and indestructible, but may undergo quantitative disintegration or fractionation, producing subtraction or reduction stages, as in the Picotee Sweet Pea, or the Dutch Rabbit. Also variation may take place by loss of factors as in the origin of the white Sweet Pea from the coloured. But regarding a factor as something which, although it may be divided, neither grows nor dwindles, neither develops nor decays, the Mendelian cannot conceive its beginning any more than we can conceive the creation of something out of nothing. Bateson asks us to consider therefore whether all the divers types of life may not have been produced by the gradual unpacking of an original complexity in the primordial, probably unicellular forms, from which existing species and varieties have descended. Such a suggestion in the present writer's opinion is in one sense a truism and in another an absurdity. That the potentiality of all the characters of all the forms that have existed, pterodactyls, dinosaurs, butterflies, birds, etc. etc., including the characters of all the varieties of the human race and of human individuals, must have been present in the primordial ancestral protoplasm, is a truism, for if the possibility of such evolution did not exist, evolution would not have taken place. But that every distinct hereditary character of man was actually present as a Mendelian factor in the ancestral _Amoeba_, and that man is merely a group of the whole complex of characters allowed to produce real effects by the removal of a host of inhibiting factors, is incredible. The truth is that biological processes are not within our powers of conception as those of physics and chemistry are, and Bateson's hypothesis is nothing but the old theory of preformation in ontogeny. Just as the old embryologists conceived the adult individual to be contained with all its organs to the most minute details within the protoplasm of the fertilised ovum or one of the gametes, so the modern Mendelian, because he is unable to conceive or to obtain the evidence of the gradual development of a hereditary factor, conceives all the hereditary factors of the whole animal kingdom packed in infinite complexity within the protoplasm of the primordial living cells. That man is complex and