454 HEREDITY AND DEVELOPMENT 



schemes have been suggested with the laudable end of throwing 

 some light on one of the most familiar facts of life — the develop- 

 ment of the germ. Thus the illustrious physiologist of Prague, 

 Ewald Hering, and that acute English thinker, Samuel Butler, 

 have suggested that development is, as it were, a materialised 

 recollection of the past ; Ernst Haeckel conceived of develop- 

 ment as due to the persistence of characteristic and complicated 

 wave-motions acquired in the past by the organic molecules ; 

 many others have looked at the matter chemically, " the same 

 substances and mixtures of substances being reproduced in 

 similar quantity and quality with regular periodicity." 



A scholarly account of these and other suggestions will be 

 found in Delage's great work on heredity, where every known 

 view is presented with fairness and lucidity and criticised with 

 unrivalled acuteness and justice. There also will be found 

 the finest exposition of the view, which we find ourselves quite 

 unable to entertain, that it is possible to dispense with any 

 postulate of " representative particles." 



§ 4. Weismann's Theory of Germinal Selection 



In 1895-6 Weismann expounded an ingenious hypothesis, 

 the main idea of which is expressed in the phrase "Germinal 

 Selection." It is an extension of the biological concept of 

 "struggle" to the individual items which compose the germ- 

 plasm — i.e. the inheritance. 



Extension of the Struggle-and-Selection Formula. — In 

 human affairs there is often struggle between different societary 

 forms — as in war and international commercial competition ; and 

 no one doubts that this involves a process of selection. This 

 is often so complex that it must be termed superorganic. An 

 adumbration of it is seen in the wars of the ants, and in the 

 competition between a pack of carnivores and a herd of herbivores. 

 Similarly, within one human societary form there may be 



