504 SUMMARY OF CURRENT RESEARCHES RELATING TO 



cells and thus upon the offspring. " Conditions affecting the parents 

 are capable of influencing and modifying the descendants.' 1 " It is 

 changes of this order which are almost inevitably neglected by bio- 

 logists — for they are not within their ken." [But their relation to the 

 precise question of the transmission or non-transmission of " acquired 

 characters " or " direct somatic modifications " has often been dis- 

 cussed.] 



Finally, Prof. Adami advances further, and finds evidence of "the 

 direct inheritance of acquired constitutional states." Immunity and its 

 converse of special susceptibility are discussed in illustration. Weis- 

 mann's theory that toxins, &c, may act directly on the germ-cells 

 as well as on the body-cells is dismissed as " a sorry and almost Jesuitic 

 play upon words." " The individual consists of body-plasm and germ- 

 plasm, and whether the defect tells primarily or secondarily upon the 

 germ-plasm of the individual, we have here examples of conditions 

 acquired by the individual being transmitted to the offspring." But 

 apart from exogenous and bacterial intoxications, there are endogenous 

 or auto-intoxications such as gout, and Prof. Adami regards " the gouty 

 diathesis as an example of truly somatogenic acquirement of an in- 

 herited and inheritable constitutional state." " Defect in bodily meta- 

 bolism has led to intoxication of the germ-cells, and the offspring show 

 a peculiar liability to be the subjects of intoxications of the same order. 

 Here what is transmitted is a constitutional state, and that constitutional 

 state may manifest itself in more than one way ; but no one will deny 

 that this is truly inheritance of an acquired condition." [It may be, 

 however, that the gouty diathesis is the expression of a germinal 

 variation.] 



Morphological Continuity of Germ-Cells in Skate.* — Dr. J. Beard, 

 in an important paper, traces the history of the germ-cells of Raja 

 batis. He interprets the large yolk-laden cells of early embryos 

 (Kuckert's " megaspheres ") as germ-cells, or the forerunners of such. 

 There is an unbroken transition, and the megaspheres do not form any 

 portion of an embryonic organ. They may occur in the most diverse 

 places and regions (except the tail), but they have a very definite main 

 germ-path — from the yolk-sac upwards between splanchnopleure and 

 gut in the hinder portion of the blastoderm. They are vagrant, how- 

 ever, and often go quite astray — forming the " verirrle Keirne " of 

 pathologists. 



The germ-cells do not arise from any part of the embryo, they 

 arise before there is any embryo at all, or are " Geschwister " with it ; 

 there is no germinal epithelium ! 



Each germ-cell is the sister-cell of the cell destined to give rise to 

 the embryo. If one of them were to begin development alongside of 

 the developing embryo, the result would be the production of a more or 

 less perfect twin. This is practically what happens in the growth of a 

 dermoid in the ovary, testis, or elsewhere. 



"The germ-cells maybe regarded as unicellular organisms, which 

 pass one part of their life-history within a multicellular sterilised 

 stock, the embryo, or metazoon, formed by one of them at a definite 



* Anat. Anzeig., xviii. (19( 0) pp. 4SE-85. 



