GERMINAL SELECTION 155 



parts of the tissues, that is, the lower vital units of 

 which they are composed, and which Wilhelm Roux, 

 when he published his Kampf der Telle (Struggle of 

 Farts), called 'molecules.' . . . "In contrast to 

 this is germinal selection, which depends upon the 

 struggle of the parts of the germ plasm, and thus 

 only occurs in organisms with differentiation of soma- 

 toplasm and germ plasm, especially in all Metazoa 

 and Metaphyta, forming in these the basis of hered- 

 itary variations. . . ." 



"Personal selection . . . decides whether the 

 variation is to persist and to spread to many descend- 

 ants so that it ultimately becomes the common prop- 

 erty of the species. . . ." 



"Cormal selection ... is the process of selec- 

 tion which effects the adaptation of animal and plant 

 stocks or corms, and which depends on the struggle of 

 the colonies among themselves. This differs from 

 personal selection only in that it decides, not the fit- 

 ness of the individual person, but that of the stock as 

 a whole." 1 



Such is the theory advanced by Weismann to rem- 

 edy, as he says, the drawbacks of exclusive selection- 

 ism. It makes many concessions to Anti-Darwinian 

 points of view and is, above all, a theory of ortho- 

 genesis, postulating a definite line of development. 

 It is one of the most logical among orthogenetic the- 



i The Evolution Theory, Vol. II, pp. 376-3T8. 



