THE IDIOPLASM THEORY 



difficulty and complexity of the problem. From his latest essay, in- 

 deed ('94), it is not easy to gather his precise position regarding the 

 theory of cytoplasmic localization. Through all his writings, never- 

 theless, runs the leading idea that the germ is definitely organized 

 before development begins, and that cleavage only reveals an organi- 

 zation that exists from the beginning. " That organization precedes 

 cell-formation and regulates it, rather than the reverse, is a conclu- 

 sion that forces itself upon us from many sides." 1 " The organism 

 exists before cleavage sets in, and persists throughout every stage of 

 cell-multiplication." 2 



All of these views, excepting those of Roux, lean more or less 

 distinctly toward the conclusion that the cytoplasm of the egg-cell 

 is from the first mapped out, as it were, into regions which corre- 

 spond with the parts of the future embryonic body. The cleavage 

 of the ovum does not create these regions, but only reveals them to 

 view by marking off their boundaries. Their topographical arrange- 

 ment in the egg does not necessarily coincide with that of the adult 

 parts, but only involves the latter as a necessary consequence some- 

 what as a picture in the kaleidoscope gives rise to a succeeding pic- 

 ture composed of the same parts in a different arrangement. The 

 germinal localization may, however, in a greater or less degree, fore- 

 shadow the arrangement of adult parts for instance, in the egg of 

 the tunicate or cephalopod, where the bilateral symmetry and antero- 

 posterior differentiation of the adult is foreshadowed not only in the 

 cleavage stages, but even in the un segmented egg. 



By another set of writers, such as Roux, De Vries, Hertwig, and 

 Weismann, germinal localization is primarily sought not in the cyto- 

 plasm, but in the nucleus ; but these views can be best considered 

 after a review of the idioplasm hypothesis, to which we now proceed. 



B. THE IDIOPLASM THEORY 



We owe to Nageli the first systematic attempt to discuss heredity 

 regarded as inherent in a definite physical basis; 3 but it is hardly 

 necessary to point out his great debt to earlier writers, foremost 

 among them Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Hackel. The essence of 

 Nageli's hypothesis was the assumption that inheritance is effected 

 by the transmission not of a cell, considered as a whole, but of a par- 

 ticular substance, the idioplasm, contained within a cell, and forming 

 the physical basis of heredity. The idioplasm, is to be sharply dis- 

 tinguished from the other constituents of the cell, which play no 

 direct part in inheritance and form a " nutritive plasma " or tropho* 



1 '93, p. 115. 2 /.-., p. 112. 3 Theorie der Abstammungslehre, 1884. 



2D 



