222 The Unity of the Organism 



cndoderm, also according to the pre-organJzed constitution 

 of the protoplasmic materials of the ovum." - 3 How is this 

 organization of the squid before cell multiplication begins 

 to be explained in accordance with the conception that 

 the creature's cells are more fundamental than the creature 

 itself and are the cause of the creature? Watase's radical 

 elementalism made it almost obligatory upon him to try to 

 answer the above question. Something of the difficulty which 

 the protozoan colony theory of the higher organism has to 

 face in such cases as this, he seems to have felt, and his way 

 of meeting it certainly has the merit of being ingenious. 

 "Even if we admit," he says, "that the unicellular ovum 

 irrespective of its stages of growth, represents actually the 

 condition of the ancestral protozoan, a highly differentiated 

 axial symmetry of a certain metazoan ovum cannot be said 

 to be an aberrant feature unrepresented in the ancestral 

 protozoa, so long as the existing forms of the protozoa 

 often show such a high degree of differentiation in that par- 

 ticular respect." 23 As though the high degree of axial 

 differentiation in some protozoan imagined to be the far- 

 away ancestor of a squid were an explanation of the axial 

 differentiation of a squid in its unicellular stage! It is 

 hardly possible for speculation to soar on less restrained 

 wings than this and maintain its claim to being scientific. 



So much by way of illustration of animal groups in which 

 the promorphology consists in a considerable measure of 

 observable differentiation while the individual animal is yet 

 in the one-celled state, or, in other words, of animals in 

 which the individual development has gone some distance in 

 the egg before cell multiplication begins. 



(c) Reflections on a Promorphology of Germ-Cells Beyond 

 the Limits of Visibility 



To make the generalization that the egg is an individual 

 animal in the one-celled stage of its life, we have now to 



