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R E V I E W

William Bateson, F.R.X., Naturalist. His Essays and Addresses together with a Short Account; of his Life, by BEATRICE BATESON. Pp. ix + 473. (Cambridge University Press, 1928.) 21s. net.

We are grateful to Mrs Bateson for giving us, largely by means of extracts from her husband’s letters, these glimpses into a remarkable and interesting character. Her memoir, which takes up.rather more than a third (160 pages) of the book, does not pretend to be a full account of Prof. Bateson’s life and work, nor of the various controversies in which he was engaged. A list of these controversies is given a t the end of the volume and it is to be hoped that some of them will eventually be published.

The taste for natural history is truly inborn; Prof. Bateson was a naturalist from the first although he received little or no encouragement from others. His life a t school was certainly not a happy one; the boy seemed out of sympathy with both his masters and schoolfellows; not until he went to the University of Cambridge did he find congenial work, and there his career was outstanding.

Early impressed with the problem of variation, he saw the need of studying nature in its own environment. With this end in view he set out on his travels to Russia in 1886, four years after graduation, to investigate the fauna of the salt lakes on the steppes. Perhaps his disappointment over the results of this expedition was due to the fact that he expected too much in a short time and that the amount of ground covered was too large, whereas a detailed study of a more circumscribed area might have been more satisfactory. It was hardly a “false clue” as he seemed to have thought. He was assuredly ahead of his time in urging, as early as 1890, in a letter of application for the Linacre Professorship at Oxford, the importance of the study of Natural History together with the so-called scientific side of Zoology. To-day, after an interval of more than thirty-eight years, the necessity of inciuding a knowledge of this kind, namely Ecology, in the curriculum of every student is only beginning to be realised.

Within the next seven years after his return from Russia we are shown with what patience and perseverance all facts were collected which had any bearing on the question of variation; this investigation Prof. Bateson now considered the most urgent one in Zoology. His capacity for hard work was amazing and an enthusiasm in everything he undertook carried him through many disappointments. The unfavourable reception of the “Materials for the Study of Variation” thus left him undaunted. In 1900, the discovery of Mendel’s papers supplied him with just the solution he required and gave him a further impetus in his work, although it is very probable that eventually Bateson would have found out Mendel’s law for himself. That his views did not appeal to other zoologists much distressed him; impatient of the slow recognition of his ideas in this country, he was greatly pleased with their ready reception in America. From 1897 to 1910 the difficulty of keeping his experiments going was always before him and a t times became acute, and but for a few private donations would have been almost impossible. The question was only finally solved on his appointment as Director of the John Innes Horticultural Institute a t Merton in 1910. His work there was carried on with the same eagerness and resource ; keen interest in his students’ investigations made him a stimulating and inspiring teacher, every new idea was an excitement.

The last years of his life were clouded by the War and by the death of his two sons, but keenness in his researches never failed him, and this same enthusiasm enabled him to enjoy a holiday to the full and showed itself in his intense appreciation of pictures and Old Masbers’ drawings which throughout his life were a constant delight to him.

The addresses which follow the memoir consist of ten papers which Bateson had hoped to publish himself in book form, and to these are added a number of other essays and reviews. The papers are left as they were written by their author, and in such a collection repetition is inevitable. It is convenient to have them all collected together but their arrangement more or less according to subject is surely a mistake. The sequence of ideas is thereby confused, whereas by adopting a chronological order the gradual growth of outlook, which is of great interest, could be more easily followed. It is disconcerting to read “Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights,’’ reprinted from Darwin and Modern Science (1909)) after the lecture on “Gamete and Zygote” delivered in 1917. Again, the Presidential Addresses to the British Association in 1904, 1911 and 1914 all follow one after the other, and after these the lecture in 1908 on “The Methods and Scope of Genetics” comes quite out of place. This criticism does not apply to the articles on education which are better read consecutively; they are an able appeal for greater breadth of view in the teaching of all subjects. Bateson was strong in his defence of retaining classics in the ordinary curriculum of the school and in the entrance examination to the university, but its teaching was to be reformed; there was to be less grammar and more reading from the point of view of literature and history. He advocated the study of biology as an introduction to science in general, but biology of the right kind and not such as is made necessary to fit in with the present system of examinations. So much depends as everyone knows on the right kind of teacher, one which it is always difficult to find.

In his first address to the Royal Horticultural Society in 1899 Bateson shows that the great question which he set out

400 R E V I E W to solve and which he pursued with a single aim throughout his life was the problem of species. He was early impressed with the magnitude of variations and was convinced that experimental breeding was the one clue to the character of these variations and as to how they were perpetuated. The need for intensive study struck him forcibly. A second lecture to the same society in the succeeding year follows similar lines and the results of Mendel are described for the first time to an English audience. Before the Neurological Society in 1906 the further results of Mendel’s law are ex- plained and their application to the study of inheritance in man, especially with regard to the hereditary transmission of disease. An account is given of the segregation of characters and of the further complications that arise when more than one character is considered. In these lectures, as also in the popular exposition of the gametes and the zygote in the Adam Sedgwick Memorial Lecture, one is impressed with his power of setting out the facts in clear and concise lan- guage. He returns to the subject of the relations of Mendelian results to man in the Herbert Spencer Lecture in 1912, and stresses the difficulty of applying them, and also the influence on human society of the latest laws of heredity. It is pointed out that new laws as made by the State are constantly changing the “genetic composition of succeeding genera- tions” according as they favour one class or discourage another; the results of legislation are not immediately apparent but the effects are seen in the next generation. He had no use for the idea of a democratic state for all men cannot be equal. All these questions are again referred to in the Galton Lecture in 1914.

An eloquent appeal for the application of the science of Genetics to agriculture and for closer cooperation between the scientist and the breeder is made in his address to the Agriculture Section of the British Association in 1911.

Bateson was long ago convinced that Natural Selection was inadequate to explain many of the facts, and at the British Association a t Melbourne he once more emphasised the reduced scope of this theory. Here he enlarged at some length on the idea already introduced in the Herbert Spencer Lecture, and again in 1922 in America, that variations arose by loss of factors rather than by acquisition of new ones, but as to how evolution was brought about there was as yet no evidence.

The latest addresses in 1922 and 1924 show how he is still convinced of the impossibility of specific distinction having been attained by the accumulation of small differences and that to the question of the origin of species there was so far no answer, the great stumbling block being the sterility of hybrids. He was moreover quite certain that natural selection could not have been the main factor in determining species. Always eager to read and keep up with the latest views and to hear of any evidence for the solution of his problems, Bateson’s outlook gradually widened. He became convinced, for example, in 1921, after a close acquaintance with Morgan’s work in America, of the importance of Cytology and the influence of the chromosomes in heredity. Having found that Genetics had so far done really nothing towards the determination of species he felt the need of cooperation both with the systematists and with the workers in the laboratory. The future of Biology was not in generalisation but in closer analysis.

Mrs Bateson promises to give a further series of letters relating to the journey in Russia; these should be of much value and their publication will be awaited with interest.

E. A. PRASER.

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY W. LEWIS, M.A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS