110 DARWINIAN INTERESTS 



a very clever remark, so deuced clever that I cannot quite 

 recollect it, and still less write it down — to the effect that the 

 cell might not contain germs or gemmules, but a potentiality 

 in shape of a homogeneous mass, whose exact future con- 

 dition, or the exact future of whose elements, depended 

 on an impulse consummated at moment of evolution. I 

 suppose he meant, just as a crystallizable compound, that 

 presents various isomorphic forms, depends on some unknown 

 influence for the crystalline form it ultimately does take — 

 but this is only my guess at his meaning, I will try and get it 

 more clearly. I fear you will laugh at my density, but I 

 cannot see that in Pangenesis you are doing aught but 

 formulating what I have always supposed to a fundamental 

 idea in all development doctrines — viz. the transference to 

 the progeny of any or every quality (property) the parent 

 possessed ; or at least the potentiality of reproducing these 

 qualities — and it was the inconceivability of grasping this 

 idea that was always a great barrier to my accepting the 

 development doctrine. You transmit this potentiality in 

 a cell — you diffuse it from that cell throughout the whole 

 living organism, and you regard a spermatic cell as neither 

 more nor less charged than others with this potentiality^ 

 Of this point I am not quite sure, I must read up every point 

 again of your argument. This was always with me an 

 essential condition of the Development Doctrine, and I do 

 not see what you gain by putting it in an imagery of germs 

 and gemmules analogous to a chemist's atoms. A chemist's 

 atoms are useful imagery, for they convey definite ideas of 

 proportions and have an exact meaning as relative values. 

 If Biology enabled us so to convey definite ideas through 

 your gemmules, they would have their use — but inasmuch 

 as organisms are not given to unite in definite proportions, 

 I do not see what you gain. 



Be all this as it may, I regard your Pangenesis chapter as 

 the most wonderful in the book, and intensely interesting — 

 it is so full of thought, of genuine mind ; and you do so love 

 it yourself. I should not care a farthing were I you what 

 people thought of it. Not one Naturalist in a hundred can 

 follow it I am sure. Spencer, Huxley, and Lubbock (if he 

 has time) may. I have not yet mastered it. The ' throwing 

 off gemmules ' is hard to hold in head, as a real vital process 



