4o8 Weismann s Theories — 



of this small moving body so stimulates the plant as to 

 produce a definite result — the growth of the gall. This 

 growth is useful enough to the grub, but is certainly use- 

 less to the plant, if not more or less prejudicial to it. It 

 is surely too much to ask us to believe that the germ-plasm 

 of the plant, in the first instance, before even, say, a single 

 Cynijps had visited it, had had the particles of its germ- 

 plasm so arranged as to compel the plant to grow a complex 

 structure beneficial not to it, but to its parasite! Surely 

 the action of natural selection would have led to the for- 

 mation of a secretion or growth suitable for killing the 

 intruder, not for nourishing and sheltering it ! Professor 

 Weismann's whole system is built up on Natural Selection. 

 One instance therefore really irreconcilable with the latter 

 theory is necessarily destructive to his own. 



More nearly connected with the question of instinct than 

 may at first appear, is the question of death — its nature 

 and its origin. AVe have already seen how the Professor 

 attributes immortality to unicellular organisms, and asserts 

 that death becomes established through the benefit thence 

 arising to the race ; but its absolutely first occurrence is 

 very inadequately explained, nor can we agree with his 

 representation of what death is. In the first place, why 

 did cells which had been immortal for untold ages begin 

 naturally to die? The Professor affirms (p. 29) it to be 

 * conceivable that all cells may possess the power of re- 

 fusing to absorb nutriment ' — a refusal necessarily fatal to 

 them. But we are quite at a loss to conceive why a cell 

 should begin to practise so extraordinary an abstinence — 

 an abstinence for which no foundation had been laid in 

 its forebears, from whose spontaneous division it had itself 

 resulted. We do not regard such a process as conceivable, 

 though it is imaginable enough — as are a countless number 

 of admitted absurdities of all kinds. The absolute origin 



