Modification of Germinal Constitution of Organisms 263 



in many of his derivatives all of the attributes of the organ- 

 ism were modified each more or less independently of the 

 others. I have expressed the opinion that, as far as my 

 observations go, one character is in the main most modified, 

 and then a greater or less array of lesser characters are less 

 modified in correlation. There is at once a fundamental 

 difference between these two expressions of experience, a 

 difference which may be due to the difference between plants 

 and animals, but I do not understand how all the attributes 

 of an organism can be modified at one time by incident forces. 

 MacDougal says, "The induced forms in plants show many 

 new qualities of fairly equal importance as far as such things 

 may be estimated, and these might be independent of each 

 other." 



I do not, at least in animals, feel competent to determine 

 the equality of characters, and thus far I have never seen 

 examples, where any considerable array of characters were 

 modified equally. As a matter of fact, I have no basis 

 in experience which would enable me to decide whether 

 characters were modified equally or not. 



If one accepts a particulate conception of the constitu- 

 tion of an organism as a true expression of organic con- 

 stitution, the modifiability of characters as expressed by 

 MacDougal would be the natural result. I have thus far 

 seen no evidence of such a condition, at least in the materials 

 under my observation, and I am therefore compelled to 

 regard the organism as a whole in the sense that it represents 

 a state of stability which is achieved and retained by a 

 mass of matter under a given set of conditions. The com- 

 bined elements are not independent and do not exist in the 

 organism as individualities, but as component parts of the 

 whole, as long as they comprise a part of that particular 



