12 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



interest in it lapse. Of what vast importance is it, 

 then, that this estate should come to the child " free 

 from waste and dilapidation ; " yet how often it proves 

 a veritable hereditas damnosa we have but to look 

 around to learn. 



As might be expected, many attempts have been 

 made by science to explain this wonderful law which 

 governs the growth and development of germ-cells, and 

 enables them to convey not only the gross racial traits, 

 but the most minute and subtle individual characters 

 from parent to offspring; yet, although some of the 

 greatest minds of our age have wrestled with the sub- 

 ject, no one has Broken the secret-house. Darwin ela- 

 borated the hypothesis which he called " Pangenesis " 

 to explain how the germ-cells gained this extraordi- 

 nary power. He supposed that minute bodies, which 

 he called " gemmules," were thrown off by all the cells 

 of the body and congregated in these germinal cells. 

 These gemmules, it was supposed, had the power of 

 reproducing cells similar to those from which they 

 came, and so the germ-cells were enabled through 

 these gemmules to produce a body complex and iden- 

 tical in every particular with those from which the 

 germ-cells came. But, unfortunately for science, this 

 is but theory; of these potent gemmules we know 

 nothing ; they have not even been proved to exist. All 

 we have is the ingenious effort of a great mind to 

 fathom what at present seems to be the unfathomable. 



Nor has any other searcher discovered more. Herbert 

 Spencer's "physiological units" and Hackel's "mole- 



