Nov., i8q4. . ANLAGEN. 367 



invisible beginnings handed on from the egg-cell. For those who, 

 like Weismann, take an extremely preformationist view of develop- 

 ment, the imagined number of definite but invisible beginnings 

 present in the egg-cell is very great, and these beginnings themselves 

 are arranged in ordered hierarchies. But even Oscar Hertwig and 

 many of the supporters of more epigenetic theories of development 

 allude to the presence of definite physical beginnings in the structure 

 of the egg-cell. Now the word used by Germans for these imagined 

 particles of the hereditary mass is also " Anlage." 



There is wanted, then, an English word to express these two 

 meanings, to include both the visible beginnings of organs and the 

 beginnings of these as imagined before they become visible. Every- 

 one who has had to translate, into English, German writings dealing 

 with embryology or with biological theory has met with the 

 difficulty of translating " Anlage " at a very early stage of his work ; 

 and even in English writing which is not based on German originals 

 the difficulty of expressing the idea has to be faced. In the search 

 for an English bearer of the idea one must remember first that the 

 idea is a concrete fact, not an abstract conception : what we want 

 to express is a definite budding or proliferation of cells on the one 

 hand ; on the other, a definite particle of nuclear matter that in 

 suitable conditions is able to control or cause the formation of the 

 definite bud or proliferation of cells. English writers have made 

 many different attempts to get hold of a suitable word. The first and 

 most obvious word is " rudiment." But, as Professor Edward 

 Mark has already pointed out in a preface to his translation of Oscar 

 Hertwig's " Text-Book of Embryology," rudiment is quite unsuit- 

 able, because- both in English and German, precise writers have used 

 it in the sense of an organ or structure which has been at one time 

 more complicated that it is at present. But a reason that seems to 

 be still more against its use as a rendering of the ideas connected 

 with "Anlage" is that we use rudiment most commonly as a term 

 denoting structures in adult organisms, whereas " Anlage " is 

 invariably, or almost invariably, connected with embryonic structures. 

 Such words as "origin," "beg-inning," and so forth, fail to express 

 the concreteness of " Anlage," the fact that it refers almost 

 invariably to objects that are either actually visible, or that have a 

 corporeal existence although invisible to us. Occasionally, but very 

 rarely, Weismann uses the word in a sense that has led Professor 

 W. N. Parker to render it by "predisposition"; but Weismann's 

 use of it in this sense is associated with a tendency of his, especially 

 noticable in " The Germ-Plasm," to glide rather easily from 

 the abstract to the concrete ; in at least some of the cases where I 

 have compared the translation with the original, it seems to me that 

 his meaning would have been more clearly, if less invitingly, expressed 

 by using a concrete English term for a word that in German is 

 abstract only in a metaphorical sense. 



