development. Every formation, whether it consist in cleavage of
layers, or folding, or complete division, is a consequence of this
fundamental law." Unfortunately, he does not explain what this "law of
growth" is; just as other opponents of the theory of selection, who
would put in its place a great "law of evolution," omit to tell us
anything about the nature of this. Nevertheless, it is quite clear
from His's works that he imagines constructive Nature to be a sort of
skilful tailor. The ingenious operator succeeds in bringing into
existence, by "evolution," all the various forms of living things by
cutting up in different ways the germinal layers, bending and folding,
tugging and splitting, and so on.

His's embryological theories excited a good deal of interest at the
time of publication, and have evoked a fair amount of literature in
the last few decades. He professed to explain the most complicated
parts of organic construction (such as the development of the brain)
in the simplest way on mechanical principles, and to derive them
immediately from simple physical processes (such as unequal
distribution of strain in an elastic plate). It is quite true that a
mechanical or monistic explanation (or a reduction of natural
processes) is the ideal of modern science, and this ideal would be
realised if we could succeed in expressing these formative processes
in mathematical formulae. His has, therefore, inserted plenty of
numbers and measurements in his embryological works, and given them an
air of "exact" scholarship by putting in a quantity of mathematical
tables. Unfortunately, they are of no value, and do not help us in the
least in forming an "exact" acquaintance with the embryonic phenomena.
Indeed, they wander from the true path altogether by neglecting the
phylogenetic method; this, he thinks, is "a mere by-path," and is "not
necessary at all for the explanation of the facts of embryology,"