and most explicitly avowed, as we shall see, by Francis Darwin.
Semon makes one rather candid admission, "The impossibility of
interpreting the phenomena of physiological stimulation by those of
direct reaction, and the undeception of those who had put faith in
this being possible, have led many on the BACKWARD PATH OF VITALISM."
Semon assuredly will never be able to complete his theory of "Mneme"
until, guided by the experience of Jennings and Driesch, he forsakes
the blind alley of mechanisticism and retraces his steps to
reasonable vitalism.


But the most notable publications bearing on our matter are
incidental to the Darwin Celebrations of 1908-9. Dr. Francis Darwin,
son, collaborator, and biographer of Charles Darwin, was selected to
preside over the Meeting of the British Association held in Dublin in
1908, the jubilee of the first publications on Natural Selection by
his father and Alfred Russel Wallace. In this address we find the
theory of Hering, Butler, Rignano, and Semon taking its proper place
as a vera causa of that variation which Natural Selection must find
before it can act, and recognised as the basis of a rational theory
of the development of the individual and of the race. The organism
is essentially purposive: the impossibility of devising any adequate
accounts of organic form and function without taking account of the
psychical side is most strenuously asserted. And with our regret
that past misunderstandings should be so prominent in Butler's works,
it was very pleasant to hear Francis Darwin's quotation from Butler's
translation of Hering {0l} followed by a personal tribute to Butler
himself.

In commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and