A new branch of embryological research has been studied very assiduously in the last decade of the nineteenth century—namely, “experimental embryology.” The great importance which has been attached to the application of physical experiments to the living organism for the last hundred years, and the valuable results that it has given to physiology in the study of the vital phenomena, have led to its extension to embryology. I was the first to make experiments of this kind during a stay of four months on the Canary Island, Lanzerote, in 1866. I there made a thorough investigation of the almost unknown embryology of the siphonophoræ. I cut a number of the embryos of these animals (which develop freely in the water, and pass through a very curious transformation), at an early stage, into several pieces, and found that a fresh organism (more or less complete, according to the size of the piece) was developed from each particle. More recently some of my pupils have made similar experiments with the embryos of vertebrates (especially the frog) and some of the invertebrates. Wilhelm Roux, in particular, has made extensive experiments, and based on them a special “mechanical embryology,” which has given rise to a good deal of discussion and controversy. Roux has published a special journal for these subjects since 1895, the _Archiv für Entwickelungsmechanik._ The contributions to it are very varied in value. Many of them are valuable papers on the physiology and pathology of the embryo. Pathological experiments—the placing of the embryo in abnormal conditions—have yielded many interesting results; just as the physiology of the normal body has for a long time derived assistance from the pathology of the diseased organism. Other of these mechanical-embryological articles return to the erroneous methods of His, and are only misleading. This must be said of the many contributions of mechanical embryology which take up a position of hostility to the theory of descent and its chief embryological foundation—the biogenetic law. This law, however, when rightly understood, is not opposed to, but is the best and most solid support of, a sound mechanical embryology. Impartial reflection and a due attention to paleontology and comparative anatomy should convince these one-sided mechanicists that the facts they have discovered—and, indeed, the whole embryological process—cannot be fully understood without the theory of descent and the biogenetic law.