260 FOUNDATIONS OF BIOLOGY 



The early embryologists were right when, watching the egg 

 develop into the chick, they maintained that development is 

 development and not merely an unfolding of an organism 

 already fashioned in more or less definite adult form. But 

 it took two centuries of research to reveal the fact that, 

 below and beyond its superficial aspects, there is a germ of 

 truth in the principle of preformation hidden in the nuclear 

 architecture that the origin of the individual, though 

 obviously through epigenesis, is fundamentally from a sort of 

 preformed basis. We no longer bother ourselves with the 

 old conundrum as to which is more complex, the hen or the 

 egg, but recognize the fact that each is complex in its way 

 the simplicity of the egg being more apparent than real as 

 is attested by every endeavor to analyze cytoplasm, nucleus, 

 chromosomes, chromatin, and beyond. 



