Another notable line of advance, entirely belonging to the period under review, and chiefly the product of the present century, is seen in the science of Cytology—­the investigation of the microscopic structure of the cells of which the body is composed.  The marvellous phenomena of cell and nuclear division have revealed much of the formerly unsuspected complexity of living things, while the universality of the processes shows how fundamentally alike is life in all its forms.  In recent years great progress has been made in correlating the phenomena of heredity and of the determination of sex with the visible structural features of the germ-cells.  Weismann attempted a beginning of this over thirty years ago, but the detailed knowledge of the facts was then insufficient.  Since the discovery of Mendel’s Law, a great amount of work has been done, chiefly in America, by E.B.  Wilson and T.H.  Morgan and their pupils, on tracing the actual physical basis of hereditary transmission.  Although the matter is far from being completely known, the results obtained make it almost indubitable that inherited characters are in some way borne by the chromosomes in the nuclei of the germ-cells.  The work of Morgan and his school has shown that the actual order in which these inherited ‘factors’ are arranged in the chromosomes can almost certainly be demonstrated, and his results go far to support the conception of the organism, referred to above, as a combination or mosaic of independently inherited features.

It was said at the beginning of this sketch that most of the more notable lines of advance in Biology could be traced back to the impetus given by the acceptance of the theory of Evolution, and the desire to test and prove that theory in every biological field.  It is most convenient, therefore, to take this root-idea as a starting-point, and to see how the various branches of study have diverged from it and have themselves branched out in various ways, and how these branches have often again become intertwined and united in the later development of the science.

Perhaps the most obvious method of testing the theory of evolution is by the study of fossil forms, and our knowledge of these has progressed enormously during the period under review.  Not only have a number of new and strange types of ancient life come to light, but in some cases, e.g. in that of the horse and elephant, a very complete series of evolutionary stages has been discovered.  In this branch, however, as in almost all others, the results have not exactly fulfilled the expectations of the early enthusiasts.  On the one hand, evolution has been shown to be a much more complex thing than at first seemed probable; and on the other, many of the gaps which it was most hoped to fill still remain.  A number of most remarkable ‘missing links’ have been discovered, such as, for example, Archaeopteryx, the stepping-stone between the Reptiles and the Birds, and the faith of the palaeontologist in the truth of evolution is everywhere confirmed.  But the hope of finding all the stages, especially in the ancestry of Man, has not been realized, and it has been found that what at one time were regarded as direct ancestors are collaterals, and that the problem of human evolution is much less simple than was once supposed.