

POTENTIALITIES AND FOEMULAE 113 



I must say that the Pangenesis chapters are in themselves 

 admirable — so careful and so good ; but what he gains by- 

 clothing what appears to be a simple, necessary and inevit- 

 able belief with all who accept the derivative hypothesis, 

 in a garb of atoms, germs and gemmules I do not see. When 

 I accepted the derivative hypothesis, I accepted the fact, 

 that each individual must contribute by a cell to its progeny 

 more or less of any or all the properties of all its forefathers ; 

 and that such properties, or the potentiality to reproduce 

 them, must be diffused from that cell more or less throughout 

 the mass of the plant. E.G. a single cell of tip of leaf of 

 Malaxis paludosa will reproduce a whole Malaxis paludosa, 

 with any or all the properties of its parent and grandparents 

 so diffused through its mass from that parent cell, that each 

 of the cells of its leaf will do ditto. This always appeared 

 to me a fundamental doctrine in the history of propagation 

 of individuals from parent to offspring. If you accept this 

 for the propagation of individuals, and reduce the origin of 

 species to the same category as the propagation of indi- 

 viduals comes under, you must accept it for these too. 

 A better instance than Malaxis is Begonia phyllomaniaca, 

 \ and a better still any cellular Alga that propagates by any 

 i constituent cell. This power of packing into a cell the 

 \ potentiality of an indefinite number of the indefinite pro- 

 - perties of its ancestors, is as much beyond our compre- 

 hension as atoms, or ethics, or time, or space, or gravity, or 

 God. And as any definite conceptions of God are to be had 

 only and solely by anthropomorphising him or his attributes, 

 so are our only ideas of the potentiality to propagate all 

 qualities by a cell, only to be formulated by calling the 

 contents of that cell atoms, gemmules, and so forth. My 

 upshot is that it is not necessary to formulate or postulate 

 such subjects at all, and better not to do so. 



To Charles Darwin 



May 20, 1868. 



You greatly underrate the interest of your [book] ; it is 

 capital reading, putting aside all question of its matter, 

 which will, if foreigners deign to read it at all, do you more 

 credit in their eyes than all your other works put together. 

 (I have not read a quarter of it jet.) Bentham has, and 



