Developmental Mechanics

Abstract

IT is questionable whether Dr. Wilhelm Roux does not do more harm than good to the cause which he has at heart by his excessive fondness for programmes. The work which lies before us is at least the fourth of a series of expositions of the nature, aims and methods of the, subject of developmental mechanics, and it differs but little from its predecessors (consisting as it largely does of extracts and quotations from them, with explanatory and justificatory additions) in the complacent, not to say assertive, manner in which its author extols his own methods and aims at the expense of those which have hitherto been in use among zoologists. To our thinking Dr. Roux's weakness lies not in his aims, which are legitimate and praiseworthy, nor in his methods, which are carefully considered, but in the persistence with which he lectures his colleagues on their shortcomings and on his own rectitude. Different persons are differently affected by oft-repeated homilies: some will acquiesce, the greater number will escape by indifference, and others will be goaded into active hostility to what they regard as the pretensions of the author. To the last category belongs Dr. Oscar Hertwig, who has recently attacked Roux in an unsparing manner, asserting that his programme is obscure and wanting in novelty; that since it is not new the very name of developmental mechanics is superfluous and, moreover, incorrect; that the method, in so far as it is new, cannot lead to any progress in biology; that it is inapplicable to the subject; and finally, that in so far as it has been applied by Roux, it has been applied in so faulty and slovenly a manner as to have produced error instead of enlightenment.

Programm und Forschungsmethoden der Eniwicklungsmechanik der Organismen, leichverständlich dargestellt.

Von Wilhelm Roux, o.ö. Professor der Anatomie und Direktor des anatomischen Instituts zu Halle. Zugleich eine Erwiderung auf O. Hertwig's Schrift Biologie und Mechanik. Pp. 203. (Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1897.)