THE FOUR LAWS OF AGE 235 



the hypothesis had better be forgotten. Then came 

 Nageli, the great botanist, who spoke of the Idio- 

 plasma-Theilchen. Then Weisner, also a botanist, 

 who spoke of the plassomes. Our own Professor 

 Whitman attributed to his life units certain other es- 

 sential qualities and called them idiosomes. A German 

 zoologist, Haacke, has called them gemmules. An- 

 other German writer, a Leipzig anatomist, Altmann, 

 calls them granuli. Now these different life units, of 

 which I have read you briefly the names, are not 

 identical according to these authors. Everybody else's 

 life units are wrong, falsely conceived, and endued 

 with qualities which they do not combine. Here is 

 a curious assemblage of " doxies," and each writer 

 is orthodox and all the others are heterodox ; and I 

 find myself viewing them all from the standpoint of 

 my "doxy," that of the structural quality of the living 

 matter, and, therefore, interpreting every one of these 

 conceptions as heterodox, not sound doctrine, but 

 something to be rejected, condemned, and fought 

 against. These theories of life units have filled up 

 many books. Among the most ardent defenders of 

 the faith in life units is Professor Weismann, whose 

 theories of heredity many of you have heard discussed; 

 though I doubt if many of you, unless you recall what 

 I said previously, are aware of the fact that the es- 

 sential part of Weismann's doctrine was the adoption 

 of the theory of germinal continuity originated by 

 Professor Nussbaum, whose name by a strange in- 

 justice has been too seldom heard in these discussions- 



