432 ORIGINATIVE FACTORS IN EVOLUTION: 



gard psychical factors as verce causes, that somehow or other 

 the psychical factors we are aware of were implicit in the 

 germ-cell whence we sprang, and that therefore it is not a 

 reversion to mediaeval physiology to keep our mind open to 

 the possibility that the origin of the profounder and more 

 vital variations may not be statable without a recognition 

 of the implicit organism of the germ-cell as at once psychical 

 and metabolic. 



Perhaps we mislead ourselves by repeating too often the 

 elementary commonplace that the Metazoon begins its life 

 as a single cell. It is true enough in a way, but certainly 

 not the whole truth. It is no commonplace cell, the gamete. 

 It is an implicit organism and within it, in some manner 

 that we cannot begin to image, though we crowd it with 

 factors and genes (the modern successors of Darwin's gem- 

 mules and Weismann's determinants), there lies a complex 

 inheritance, unified afresh at the start of each new genera- 

 tion. If an Amoeba has a behaviour, as Professor Jennings 

 seems to have proved, may not the much more richly-en- 

 dowed germ-cell of a fruit-fly be allowed the capacity of 

 putting its house in order? If the Foraminifer Technitella 

 thompsoni picks and chooses the materials of its encasement 

 and builds this with what looks like a dawning art, may 

 not the ovum of an Evening Primrose be allowed some free- 

 dom of internal architecture ? Germ-cells are not corpuscles 

 of undifferentiated protoplasm. They are individualities 

 that live and multiply, that struggle and combine. They 

 are repositories of multiplicate inheritances borne by strangely 

 persistent smaller living units, the chromosomes, which ad- 

 just themselves in the most momentous of organic compro- 

 mises. Is it fanciful to suppose that these gametes, neither 

 simple cells nor portmanteaus of hereditary factors, but 



