Ryder.] May 16> 



oldest ; the female the youngest. The male state also as represented in 

 the spermatic body tends to revert to the most ancient form of all free 

 mobile organisms, namely, the flagellate Schizomycetes. The tendency 

 towards maleness is therefore also to be identified with a universal ten- 

 dency of all organisms to recapitulate the most ancient and primitive of 

 living conditions when organisms existed only in watery or fluid media. 

 The further generalizations that all organisms tend to recapitulate the 

 primaeval monadiform condition is also fully justified, and that the really 

 primordial type of the germs of all living forms is a flagellate cell and 

 not an ovum. This will become clearer, as it will be later shown that the 

 ovum is secondary and is really a germ which has been arrested in its 

 attempt to reach the flagellate condition, and that the polar bodies are 

 merely the expression of an expiring tendency in the egg to revert to the 

 male or primaeval flagellate condition. 



The genesis of sexuality itself is merely incidental to the continuous 

 processes of growth manifested by all living forms. It is an outgrowth ot 

 self-regulated processes of nutrition and of the repulsion of accumulations 

 of surplus nutriment to parts of the organization of multicellular forms 

 where it is not in the way of the other physiological activities. This is 

 the real significance and origin of the process of the isolation of germinal 

 matter. It is not a "device "or an " expedient " specially contrived for 

 the preservation of the immortality of "germ-plasma," which was not 

 first "set aside " in Metazoa, as held by Weismann, but which began to 

 be pushed aside and out of the way in Protozoa, as many facts show even 

 as low down in the scale as Amoeba, thus placing Lendl's criticisms of 

 Weismann upon the basis of fact.* 



We have seen that the female and male germs can be actually con- 

 trasted only on the ground that they are constituted of two kinds of plas- 

 ma in different proportions. We have also seen that the chromatin pre- 

 sumably preponderates in the lowest living forms, which are also univer- 

 sally asexual but capable of the most prodigious rates of multiplication 

 owing to rapid growth of their substance (mainly chromatin-like) under 

 favorable conditions. These lowest forms are also flagellate, probably 

 universally so under certain conditions. In the next stage of evolution 

 the tendency is for certain cells to grow to a large size and then break 

 down into flagellate spores which are alike and constitute the germs of 

 the species. The next stage is where certain of these enlarged cells break 

 down into flagellate spores of unequal size, the larger become female and 

 the smaller male and incipient sexuality is developed. The process may 

 even begin with the conjugation of similar binucleated individual cells, as 

 in ciliate Protozoa, but there again the production of the spermatic plasma 



* In this con nection see Brass, "Die Zelle das Element der Organischen Welt," pp. 

 63-65. Leipzig, 1889. Also Lendl, " Hypothese iiber die Entstehung von Soma- und Propa- 

 gations-Zellen." Berlin, 1889. Also Lillie E. Holman, " Observation on Multiplication 

 inAmcebse." Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philad., pp. 346-348, 1886. Leidy's "Rhizopods N. 

 America," where the chromatin balls Of the nuclei are figured as being expelled from 

 the nucleus and the animal presumably as germs. 



