THE GERM-PLASM THEORY 351 



It maintains that the development of the ovum to the perfect animal 

 is not_reallx a new creation, b ut only an unfolding of invisible small 

 parts, w hich were alre ady present in the ovuim It assumes that 

 the par ts of the perfect org anism arc already preformed In the ovum, 

 an d~on this account it is called the^Trelormation Tlicory.' Bonnet 

 often speaks of the pr eformati(jn of the perfect animal in the, germ 

 a s a 'miniature model,' although his conce ption of ' •■\olution'_was 

 n ot really so crude as has been often all eged. He expre ssly 

 em phasized that this miniature model was not exactly l ike the 

 per fect animal, bu t consist ed of 'elem entary parts' only, which he 

 thought of as a net whose meshes were filled up during develoj)ment 

 and by means of nutrition with an infinite number of other parts. 

 But after all, his conceptions, and those of his time generall}', were 

 very far removed from the biological thinking of our own day, as 

 may perhaps be most readily understood when I mention that he 

 re garded de ath and decay as an ' involution,' as a folding bac k, 

 so to speak, by means of which all the parts gained though nutrition 

 were removed again, so that the net of the miniature model shrank 

 together to the invisible minuteness that it had in the ovum. So 

 it remained, he fancied, till it was reawakened at the resurrection, 

 using the term in the religious sense ! He afterwards dropped 

 this fancy, Ijecause the objection was made to it that human beings 

 who had lost a leg or an arm in this life would necessarily be maimed 

 at the resurrection ! 



In Bonnet's time the facts of development were quite unknown, 

 and not even the stages of the development of the chick from the 

 egg had been observed. When this was afterwards done the 

 prevalent theory of ' evolution ' necessarily collapsed, for men saw 

 with their own eyes that a miniature model of the chick did not 

 gradually grow into visibility and ultimately into the young chick, 

 but that first of all parts showed themselves in the egg which bore 

 no resemblance at all to the chick, that these first rudiments were 

 then altered, and that through continual new formations and trans- 

 formations the chick finally appeared. Upon this K. von Wolff based 

 his t heory of ' Epigenesis,' or dev elopment throu gh new form ations 

 an d transformations ! He maintained that the doctrine of ' Evolutio ' 

 was false ; that there is no miniatu re model invisibly contain ed within 

 the eg^; but that from the simpl e egg- substance there ar ises, 

 through the agency or iTie~formative powers inherent in it, a long 

 series of stages of developmen t, of which ea ch succeeding one i s more 

 complex than th e one before , until ultimat ely the perfect animal is 

 reached — 



