italics).[7] So, on this fundamental point, he stands where he did when he began the study of variation, but apart from this point he again threw out his suggestion of 1909 as to the unpacking and repacking of an original complexity. At Melbourne he said, “Lotsy has lately with great courage suggested to us that all variation may be due to such crossing. I do not disguise my sympathy with this effort.”[8] _All variation!_ He said later, “In spite of seeming perversity, therefore, we have to admit that there is no evolutionary change which in the present state of our knowledge we can positively declare _not due to loss_.”[9] (Italics mine.) These two statements of 1914 are enough to show that the biologist of 1894, 1899, 1909 and 1914 has evolved in a definite line, and it is to his honour that he has remembered “to thine ownself be true.” But he is not so true to himself in his scorn of those who propound theories. For myself I would give little for the biologist who did not hold or propound some theory. What was the penultimate and stirring message of the gifted G. B. Howes? “We live by ideas, we advance by a knowledge of the facts.” The self-denying ordinance affirmed and reaffirmed by Prof. Bateson is not observed even in the Melbourne and Sydney addresses. In the former, he says “at first it may seem rank absurdity to suppose that the primordial form or forms of protoplasm could have contained complexity enough to produce the divers types of life,” and asks us to open our minds to this possibility. Again “I have confidence that the artistic gifts of mankind will prove to be due not to something added to the makeup of an ordinary man, but to the absence of factors which in the normal person inhibit the development of these gifts.” And at Sydney, “Ages before written history began, in some unknown place, plants, or more likely a plant of wheat lost the dominant factor to which this brittleness is due, and the recessive thrashable wheat resulted. Some man noticed this wonderful novelty, and it has been disseminated over the earth. The original variation may well have occurred once only in a single germ,” and “so must it have been with man.”[10] [4] _Materials for the Study of Variation_, p. 5. [5] _Op, cit._, p. 568. [6] _Op. cit._, p. 78. [7] _Nature_, 1914. [8] _Op. cit._, Aug. 20th and Aug. 27th, 1914. [9] _Nature_, 1914. [10] _Op. cit._, 1914. These are three stupendous stretches of imagination and theory in one address, which would have been the poorer if they had not overcome the accomplished speaker’s dislike of the theories--of others. If they are not ideal constructions of a high order I do not know the meaning of that term. They are worthy of Weismann the Prince of ideal constructionists. Prof. Bateson might indeed be another Newton with his _Hypotheses non fingo_.