although it is very difficult to make them intelligible to persons unfamiliar with the main facts of modern embryology.[1]
The problem is thus stated by Weismann: "How is it that in the case of all higher animals and plants a single cell is able to separate itself from amongst the millions of most various kinds of which an organism is composed, and by division and complicated differentiation to reconstruct a new individual with marvellous likeness, unchanged in many cases even throughout whole geological periods?" Darwin attempted to solve the problem by his theory of "Pangenesis," which supposed that every individual cell in the body gave off gemmules or germs capable of reproducing themselves, and that portions of these germs of each of the almost infinite number of cells permeate the whole body and become collected in the generative cells, and are thus able to reproduce the whole organism. This theory is felt to be so ponderously complex and difficult that it has met with no general acceptance among physiologists.
The fact that the germ-cells do reproduce with wonderful accuracy not only the general characters of the species, but many of the individual characteristics of the parents or more remote ancestors, and that this process is continued from generation to generation, can be accounted for, Weismann thinks, only on two suppositions which are physiologically possible. Either the substance of the parent germ-cell, after passing through a cycle of changes required for the construction of a new individual, possesses the capability of producing anew germ-cells identical with those from which that individual was developed, or the new germ-cells arise, as far as their essential and characteristic substance is concerned, not at all out of the body of the individual, but direct from the parent germ-cell. This latter view Weismann holds to be the correct one, and, on this theory, heredity depends on the fact that a substance of special molecular composition passes over from one generation to another. This is the "germ-plasm," the power of which to develop itself into a perfect organism depends on the extraordinary complication of its minutest structure. At every new birth a portion
- ↑ The outline here given is derived from two articles in Nature, vol. xxxiii. p. 154, and vol. xxxiv. p. 629, in which Weismann's papers are summarised and partly translated.
