Bateson’s work chiefly requires to be considered here because to any reader of it there must come the conviction on the one hand of Prof. Bateson’s merits and power, and on the other of his limitation as a student of organic evolution. In 1894 is evident already an exclusive attention to structure rather than function, to anatomy than physiology; the anatomical leaven in doctrine has leavened the whole lump. For him physiology of animals and plants does not exist, or at the best is the outcome of structures which arise through variation and selection. This, if I may say so, is as much his strength as his weakness. There have been other great biologists, such as Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire and Richard Owen, of whom this is true. If that were all one would not wish the reader to be troubled with any criticism of one’s betters, indeed such remarks as are here made do not amount to criticism at all, but just plain text-book statements. It is also evident that the outlook of Prof. Bateson was being prepared for a revelation which had not yet come, in which he took a prominent, if not dominant part, I mean the great rediscovery of Mendel’s work by de Vries, Correns and Tschermak and himself in England. His keen and close attention to anatomical structures was preparing his mind for the germinal conceptions of unit-characters, dominance and segregation. The intensive cultivation of the fertile field of genetics proceeded apace, and Prof. Bateson in his contribution to the jubilee-volume of 1909 betrayed the trend of his devotion to a system of _distribution_ rather than formation of the qualities of an organism. The organism as an historical functioning, striving being, had receded once for all from his vision. He hazarded the suggestion in _Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights_ that “variation consists largely in the unpacking and repacking of an original complexity,” and that “it is not so certain as we might like to think that the order of these events is not predetermined.” Incidentally one may remark that, _malgré lui_, Prof. Bateson stands forth as a modern Paley as does Weismann in his great rival and opposing scheme. It is true that he says “I see no ground whatever for holding such a view, but in fairness the possibility should not be forgotten and in the light of modern research it scarcely looks so absurdly improbable as before.” Having drawn the sword he threw away the scabbard in 1914 when he occupied the presidential chair of the British Association of Science at Melbourne and Sydney. He had said in 1894 in his book on variation as stated before, “Inquiry into the causes of variation is as yet, in my opinion, premature,” and then in 1914 at Melbourne, after twenty more years of study of the subject in the Mendelian direction, “It is likely that the occurrence of these variations is wholly irregular, and as to their causation _we are absolutely without surmise or even plausible speculation_.” (my