In reply, I plead that, like Naegeli, De Vries, Driesch, and others, I have tried to blend all that is good in both theories. My theory may be called _evolutionary_, because it assumes the existence of a specific and highly-organised initial plasm as the basis of the process of development. It may be called _epigenetic_, because the rudiments grow and become elaborated, from stage to stage, only in the presence of numerous external conditions and stimuli, beginning with the metabolic processes preceding the first cleavage of the egg-cell, until the final product of the development is as different from the first rudiment as adult animals and plants differ from their constituent cells. To explain more clearly my conception of the nature of the process of development, especially in the relations that I conceive to exist between the rudiment and the adult, I shall conclude by reverting to my comparison between a human community and an organism. As a man arises from an egg-cell by cell multiplication and cell differentiation, so the human community, a composite organism of a still higher nature, has arisen from separate human beings as its starting-point. Culture and civilization are the wonderfully complicated results of the co-operation of many individuals united in society. By the manifolding of their relations and their combinations, men in society have brought about a higher complexity than man, left by himself, ever would have been able to develop from his own individual properties--a complexity that has arisen by the interaction of the same characters of many men in co-operation. Similarly the activity of the egg in growth and cell-formation is an inexhaustible source of new complexity; for the self-multiplying systems of units, always binding themselves into higher complexes, continually enter into new interrelations, and afford the opportunity for new combinations of forces--in fact, of new characters. Both cases--the course of the development of the egg-cell into a man, and of men into a state--depend upon epigenesis, not upon evolution. The comparison may be carried into details. The more complex and higher organisation of human society occurs in this fashion: of the numerous single individuals, all of which are endowed with the various incipient human characters, some individuals elaborate some incipient characters, others other characters, and these come to play correspondingly different parts. The special differentiation undergone by any individual depends upon the special place he comes to occupy in the whole of which he is a part, not upon really different organisation residing in him from his birth. Beside those characters which have developed specially in his case, there lie dormant the rudiments of all the characters possessed by men, and, under different conditions, these might have come to development.