1'RESIDKNTIAL ADDRKSS. \:\ 



are greatly influenced by the environment, and, consisting en 

 tirely as it were of reproductive cells, naturally transmit their 

 variations to their descendants directly. Only thus can vari 

 ability be perpetuated, and whatever is true of them is true 

 of all germ-cells. "The origin of hereditary individual vari 

 ability," says Weismann, "cannot indeed be found in the 

 higher organisms the Metazoa and Metaphyta ; but is to be 

 sought for in the lowest the unicellular organisms. In these 

 latter the distinction between body -cell and germ-cell does not 

 exist. Such organisms are reproduced by division, and if, 

 therefore, any one of them becomes changed in the course of 

 its life by some external influence, and thus receives, an indi 

 vidual character, the method of reproduction ensures that the 

 acquired peculiarity will be transmitted to its descendants" 

 (pp. 277-278). 



It is here that comes in his fundamental doctrine of the con 

 tinuity of the germ-plasm. If not the germ-cells, at least the 

 germ-plasm of either parent passes intact to the offspring. It 

 is perpetual, or as he calls it, immortal. It gives to the new 

 being its special character, but receives nothing from it. It 

 remains in the offspring until it in turn becomes a parent, and 

 again passes to the third generation without ever having ceased 

 to live. Every living being on the globe tp-day contains in 

 its germ-plasm something that has never ceased to live since 

 the original life-breath was breathed into organic nature. 

 Through all the ancestral types of the phyletic chain it has 

 persisted, passing from parent to offspring through the trans 

 forming series, so that in the loins of the highest types of man 

 there is something which was still living in the lowest primor 

 dial worm and even in the bathybian ooze of those primeval 

 waters which in the earliest Cambrian . times succeeded the 

 formation of the original crust of the globe. 



