NEW PLUMS AND PRUNES 153 



In our former views, when we considered the 

 transmission of complex qualities by the infini- 

 tesimal pollen grain the thing seemed utterly in- 

 scrutable and mysterious. But now, with the 

 aid of the new facts that the physicist has 

 supplied us, the mystery is somewhat clarified. 

 He shows that the smallest visible bit of proto- 

 plasm must contain at least twenty billion 

 atoms. 



So there would be enough of these atoms to 

 supply no fewer than twenty million to make 

 up the structure of each individual hereditary 

 factor. 



Now twenty million bricks, of ordinary size, 

 piled solidly together, would make a mass 100 

 feet square and 300 feet high. 



So the structure of each hereditary factor of 

 all the thousand in our infinitesimal speck of 

 germ plasm may be as complex as any building 

 that could be made with such a pile of bricks 

 as that and more complex, no doubt. 



Add that each individual atom in our germ 

 plasm structure is no crude brick, but is con- 

 ceived by the best informed students of physical 

 science to be "at least as complex as a piano," 

 and we gain a yet clearer conception of the pos- 

 sible intricacies of the mechanism of each of our 

 imagined thousand hereditary factors. 



