Biological Papers. 339 



be recessive. These are certainly strange propensities for matter 

 to exhibit. 



Weismann has never seen a biophor nor a determinant, but imag- 

 ines them to exist, just as the chemist imagines atoms to exist, never 

 having seen them, because they enable him to offer a solution to a 

 difficult problem. Weismann fails to note one serious difference 

 between the condition of atoms in a molecule and that of molecules 

 in a biophor or a determinant. Atoms are probably held by power- 

 ful polar forces to a definite arrangement in the molecule; but the 

 molecules of biophors and determinants in a fluid, colloidal mass 

 like protoplasm can have no such fixed arrangement. The few 

 kinds of molecules in the rapidly multiplying chromatin granules 

 or microsomes are in a constant state of flux of construction and 

 destruction during the lifetime of every protoplasmic cell. Even 

 if all proteids were crystalloids, this instability of molecular arrange- 

 ment but proves the presence of an influence, such as life can exert, 

 that can build or unmake crystals with a rapidity and ease unknown 

 in all other crystalline substances. 



Nutriment and oxygen must flow in a steady stream into the 

 living cell, energy must be continuously liberated for the activities 

 of the protoplasm, and useless matter must be as continuously ex- 

 creted, or the cell dies. All this would seem to prove beyond ques- 

 tion that the many kinds of molecules, their definite and stable 

 arrangement in the biophors and determinants, required to give a 

 physical basis to the germ-plasm hypothesis, are absent from living 

 protoplasm. No known law of chemistry, no known law of physics, 

 sanctions the statement that the arrangement of the molecules and 

 supermolecules in colloidal matter like protoplasm can and does 

 produce combinations possessing the characteristics of the biophors, 

 and determinants claimed by Weismann and his disciples. 



But some disciple of Weismannism may say that the qualities; 

 exhibited by all the kinds of plants and animals may inhere, never- 

 theless, in some unknown way in the matter composing their bodies. 

 Darwin and many others beside Weismann have imagined that this 

 might be true. What are the possibilities for matter to play an 

 important part in heredity? The qualities of the parents go in 

 some way to the offspring. Either matter must possess and carry 

 them or we must make an entity of that so-called quality of matter, 

 termed life, and let it carry the inherited qualities. The second 

 horn of the dilemma is the one which a rapidly increasing number 

 of biologists have decided to take, and even Weismann admits that 

 life may be the bearer of inherited characteristics from parents to 



