136 TEE BIOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF TO-DAY 



In reply, I plead that, like Naegeli, De Vries, 

 Driesch, and others, I have tried to blend all that 

 is good in both theories. My theory may be called 

 evolutionary, because it assumes the existence of a 

 specific and highly-organised initial plasm as the 

 basis of the process of development. It may be 

 called epigenetic, because the rudiments grow and 

 become elaborated, from stage to stage, only in the 

 presence of numerous external conditions and 

 stimuli, beginning with the metabolic processes 

 preceding the first cleavage of the egg-cell, until 

 the final product of the development is as different 

 from the first rudiment as adult animals and plants 

 differ from their constituent cells. 



To explain more clearly my conception of the 

 nature of the process of development, especially in 

 the relations that I conceive to exist between the 

 rudiment and the adult, I shall conclude by revert- 

 ing to my comparison between a human community 

 and an organism. 



As a man arises from an egg-cell by cell 

 multiplication and cell differentiation, so the 

 human community, a composite organism of a 

 still higher nature, has arisen from separate human 

 beings as its starting-point. 



Culture and civilization are the wonderfully com- 

 plicated results of the co-operation of many in- 

 dividuals united in society. By the manifolding 

 of their relations and their combinations, men in 

 society have brought about a higher complexity 

 than man, left by himself, ever would have been 

 able to develop from his own individual properties 



