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THE METHODS AND SCOPE OF GENETICS


CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
London: FETTER LANE, E.C.
C. F. CLAY, MANAGER

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Edinburgh: 100, PRINCES STREET
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Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.

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THE METHODS AND SCOPE OF GENETICS

_AN INAUGURAL LECTURE DELIVERED 23 OCTOBER 1908_

by
W. BATESON, M.A., F.R.S.

PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Cambridge:
at the University Press
1912


_First Edition 1908_
_Reprinted 1912_




PREFATORY NOTE


The Professorship of Biology was founded in 1908 for a period of five
years partly by the generosity of an anonymous benefactor, and partly by
the University of Cambridge. The object of the endowment was the
promotion of inquiries into the physiology of Heredity and Variation, a
study now spoken of as Genetics.

It is now recognized that the progress of such inquiries will chiefly be
accomplished by the application of experimental methods, especially
those which Mendel's discovery has suggested. The purpose of this
inaugural lecture is to describe the outlook over this field of research
in a manner intelligible to students of other parts of knowledge.

W. B.

_28 October, 1908_




THE METHODS AND SCOPE OF GENETICS


The opportunity of addressing fellow-students pursuing lines of inquiry
other than his own falls seldom to a scientific man. One of these rare
opportunities is offered by the constitution of the Professorship to
which I have had the honour to be called. That Professorship, though
bearing the comprehensive title "of Biology," is founded with the
understanding that the holder shall apply himself to a particular class
of physiological problems, the study of which is denoted by the term
Genetics. The term is new; and though the problems are among the oldest
which have vexed the human mind, the modes by which they may be
successfully attacked are also of modern invention. There is therefore
a certain fitness in the employment of this occasion for the deliverance
of a discourse explaining something of the aims of Genetics and of the
methods by which we trust they may be reached.

You will be aware that the claims put forward in the name of Genetics
are high, but I trust to be able to show you that they are not high
without reason. It is the ambition of every one who in youth devotes
himself to the search for natural truth, that his work may be found
somewhere in the main stream of progress. So long only as he keeps
something of the limitless hope with which his voyage of discovery
began, will his courage and his spirit last. The moment we most dread is
one in which it may appear that, after all, our effort has been spent in
exploring some petty tributary, or worse, a backwater of the great
current. It is because Genetic research is still pushing forward in the
central undifferentiated trunk of biological science that we confess no
guilt of presumption in declaring boldly that whatever difficulty may be
in store for those who cast in their lot with us, they need fear no
disillusionment or misgiving that their labour has been wasted on a
paltry quest.

In research, as in all business of exploration, the stirring times come
when a fresh region is suddenly unlocked by the discovery of a new key.
Then conquest is easy and there are prizes for all. We are happy in that
during our own time not a few such territories have been revealed to the
vision of mankind. I do not dare to suggest that in magnitude or
splendour the field of Genetics may be compared with that now being
disclosed to the physicist or the astronomer; for the glory of the
celestial is one and the glory of the terrestrial is another. But I
will say that for once to the man of ordinary power who cannot venture
into those heights beyond, Mendel's clue has shown the way into a realm
of nature which for surprising novelty and adventure is hardly to be
excelled.

It is no hyperbolical figure that I use when I speak of Mendelian
discovery leading us into a new world, the very existence of which was
unsuspected before.

The road thither is simple and easy to follow. We start from a common
fact, familiar to everyone, that all the ordinary animals and plants
began their individual life by the union of two cells, the one male, the
other female. Those cells are known as germ-cells or _gametes_, that is
to say, "marrying" cells.

Now obviously the diversity of form which is characteristic of the
animal and plant world must be somehow represented in the gametes, since