**% 



What is Her edity f 9 



body, or of anything like it. It has been carefully 

 studied with all the resources of modern science, but ex- 

 amination shows nothing within it which is more like a 

 bee than a mass of iron is like an iron ship. This egg is 

 not even fertilized, but it develops into a perfect worker, 

 with all its wonderful structure and instincts, by virtue 

 of something which it contained when it left the ovary of 

 its mother. It is true that it is not left quite to itself, 

 but is carefully attended and cared for by other bees; but 

 everything which they do for it might be done just as 

 well by delicate machinery, and the attention has no ten- 

 dency whatever to manufacture a bee. Proper heat and 

 access to air are as necessary as attention, and attention 

 has no more power to produce a bee than air or heat. 



K No one who is familiar with marine animals can be- 

 lieve for an instant that the conditions to which an egg 

 is exposed have anything whatever to do with the charac- 

 ter of the animal to which it gives riseA We may arti- 

 ficially remove eggs from the ovaries of several different 

 animals, fertilize them artificially, and then place them 

 together in a tumbler of sea water, and expose them to 

 exactly similar external conditions, yet each one will fol- 

 low its own determined course, and we may rear in the 

 same tumbler of water from eggs which are hardly dis- 

 tinguishable animals which have less in common than a 

 dog and a bird. 



If there is no mystery in the performance by the com- 

 plicated organs of an adult animal of all its complicated 

 functions, what shall we say when we find the power to 

 perform these functions existing in a latent state in the 

 egg, without the corresponding organs? 



This is the problem of heredity. In the mind of the 

 . naturalist the word calls up the greatest of all the won- 

 ders of the material universe: the existence, in a simple, 



