Vitality and Organization of Protoplasm. 23 



differentiated and developed^, no progressive varieties of organic beings 

 could have ever come into existence. No manner of mere grouping of 

 biophorcs at a definite stage of their own development could give rise 

 to tissues or organisms of a higher order than they themselves ger- 

 minally represent. And with Weismann it is accordingly the specific- 

 ally developed biophores of the determinants^, and not the determinants 

 themselves as specific groupS;, that are said to transform indifferent 

 soma-plasm into specific tissues. Only after the biophores have singly 

 dispersed, dissolving their grouped connection, do they come to exer- 

 cise their marvelous structure-determining influence. In every instance 

 variation, development and formative potency have in this theory to be 

 attributed exclusively to the biophores of the germ-plasm. 



Consequently, all phyletic and all ontogenetic efficiencies being incor- 

 porated in the germ-plasm biophores, natural selection, as such, can 

 nowise bring about any kind of organic change or development. It 

 can consistently with the theory only select varieties whose progressive 

 potentialities have been predetermined in the biophores of the germ- 

 plasm. Natural selection is therefore no formative factor in organic 

 development, as often surreptitiously assumed. And so the task re- 

 mains, untouched by Weismann's theory; the task to ascertain what 

 conditions have really brought about the progressive phyletic develop- 

 ment potentially incorporated in the germ-plasm of higher organisms. 

 Naegeli endowed his idioplasm with an intrinsic propensity phyletic- 

 ally to develop, leaving thus progressive evolution a scientifically un- 

 explained mystery. To believe, however, in accordance with the theory 

 here examined, that mere nutritive accidental .variations of the densely 

 clustered biophores composing the vitally sequestered chromosomes of 

 nuclear plasm, have been competent so wondrously to differentiate and to 

 develop these hypothetical beings, that they have become thereby fit to 

 produce by self-multiplication, the divers organic tissues ; and conjointly 

 to form, moreover, the eminently purposeful somatic configuration of 

 the unitary adult organism, an organism functionally adapted out and 

 out, and through and through, to a definite environment, upon wJiose 

 constant, manifold interactions its very being and life are dependent, 

 and with which the germ-plasm biophores are said to stand in no re- 

 motest vital relation; — to believe and postulate so groundlessly inco- 

 herent a state of things, in order to explain the most interdependently 

 coherent and aimfully elaborated product of nature; this hypothetical 

 effort affords, surely, one of the most glaring examples of elucidating 

 obscurium per obscurius. 



But concede that the germ-plasm is really composed of biophores, 

 and that these become in some way specifically differentiated and de- 

 veloped, as required by the theory; let these biophores multiply by self- 

 division and form specific determinants ; let, furthermore, definite 

 assortments, of such determinants group themselves into ids, in which 

 all distinctive traits of the adult organism are representatively pre- 

 formed ; and let, finally, a sufficient number of such ids be grouped so 



