WHAT THE TERMS MEAN 5 



moment's consideration suffices to show that ideas and phrases 

 borrowed from the inheritance of property — something quite 

 apart from the individual who inherits— are apt to cause ob- 

 scurity and fallacy when applied to the inheritance of characters 

 which literally constitute the organism and are inseparable 

 from it. Therefore, as the biological conception of inheritance 

 seems still to suffer from the irrelevancy of the analogy to which 



Fig. 1. — Ovum of a threadworm (Ascaris), showing (a) the chromosomes 

 of the nucleus, and the reserve products in the surrounding cell- 

 substance. — From Carnoy. 



the term owes its origin, let us dwell for a little on the fact that, 

 at the start of an individual life, the inheritance and the organism 

 are identical. In other words, the idea of organic inheritance 

 is merely a convenient scientific abstraction, by which we seek 

 to distinguish what the organism is, in virtue of its germinal 

 origin, from what it is as the result of the influence of ensuing 

 circumstances. If we may use Galton's and Shakespeare's 

 terms, the idea of organic inheritance is an abstraction by which 



