APPENDIX E 269
without
the least acknowledgment. This at times has happened to my mistakes also. Dr.
Loeb has, I fear, yet to learn that all investigators are not like him and me—
full of zeal for the advancement of science—but that sometimes the advancement
of self takes the foremost place, and then the work of others may seem a
legitimate spoil. There is also such a thing as verifying one’s citations, the
neglect of which may account for the “transmitted mistake” mentioned by
him. I never met more than
two other embryologists who had actually read
Carl
Ernst von Baer’s big work on the “Development of Animals” (“Entwicklungsgeschiehte der Thiere”), but I
have seen scores and scores of “citations” from this classic work, and as a
rule these were false. One embryologist once—and not so long ago—printed a
paper on “von Baer’s law,” neglecting to mention that von Baer laid down four
laws of development, which at their bases are really two, and which do not
include the ‘‘ law attributed to von Baer, who had, indeed, opposed it
bitterly.
I
should like to draw attention to Dr. Loeb’s statement that the corpus luteum
does not act on the wall of the oviduct—a fact with significant bearings upon
tubal gestations and their consequences. The real import of the action upon
the uterus I recognize in the production of a mass of tissue (the decidua)
furnished for the trophoblast to act upon, instead of permitting it to erode
its way through the uterine wall, when the consequences would be as grave as
they are in a tubal gestation. From this Dr. Loeb will, I trust, see that even
his latest results perchance do not reveal the full story. Did the corpus
luteum not help the uterus to provide this nutritive cushion for the action of
the trophoblast, it is certain that each one of us would in his own gestation,
by means of a malignant “ trophoblastoma” or so-called chorioepithelioma, kill
his own parent, and in doing so bring about his own destruction.
On
one occasion the writer reminded the editors of the