LOCATIONAL TERMS, CYTOLOGY OF DESCENT 125 



rise and fall of the tides is so little as to interfere in no way with the 

 life activities of the nemas. On open ocean beaches, where the force 

 of the breakers is greatest the nemas take on forms and acquire habits 

 that protect them from destruction, a tougher cuticle, and the habits 

 of burrowing and of coiling themselves into a "ball." 



Beach nemas in their turn are devoured by the larger animals dwell- 

 ing in and on the sand, and thus form one of the links in a chain from 

 the most minute forms of life to those of largest size. 



Beach nemas lead a very active life, winding in and out among the 

 grains of sand as do snakes in a pile of stones. The earth's hundreds 

 of thousands of miles of beach sand, far from being barren, must be 

 reckoned as a productive area of some little importance. 



LOCATIONAL TERMS FOR THE CYTOLOGY OF DESCENT 



There is no satisfactory locational terminology connected with par- 

 thenogenesis, hermaphroditism and bisexuality; in other words, with 

 the space relationships of the reproductive cells and their essential 

 elements, a terminology enabling us to answer succinctly such ques- 

 tions as, "How are these cells and their elements located with reference 

 to each other?" Such nomenclature as we have for this purpose has 

 accumulated, bit by bit, through successive contributions of more 

 or less independent investigators, and, naturally enough, has become 

 a very heterogeneous mixture of terms and phrases. 



Aside from standing open to the criticism of being inadequate and 

 an incongruous mixture, such terms as are in current use, at least a 

 considerable portion of them, date from a time when our knowledge 

 of the chromosomes and their relationships to each other and to hered- 

 ity was either non-existent or much less complete than at present. 

 Most of these terms, therefore, are based on the assumption that the 

 body or soma is the principal or predominant feature of the organism, 

 and, philologically speaking, they take little or no account of the mod- 

 ern view of the importance of the gametes and of the r61e they play. 



As we seem in need of a more adequate and homogeneous set of 

 terms based on the relationship to each other in space of the gonads, 

 the gametes, and the chromosomes and other intra-cellular elements, 

 I call attention to the following series of terms, positional rather than 

 physiological, I have been using to meet this need: Just as we have 

 "cone" and "conic" evolved from the Greek KOVOS, I derive the 



