INTRODUCTION 11 



the early part of the nineteenth century, and Darwin, in 

 order to account for the transmission of acquired characters, 

 founded his theory of ' pangenesis ', by which he considered 

 the germ cells were compounded of minute germs from every 

 part of the body, and he thus accounted for the transmission 

 of acquired as well as congenital variations ; but this theory 

 has been abandoned by subsequent authorities. 



The theory that characters acquired during the life of the 

 individual are transmitted by heredity has met with very 

 little acceptance in Great Britain or in Germany, but has 

 many supporters in France and especially in America, where 

 the school of neo-Lamarckians, supported by such eminent 

 naturalists as Cope, Ryder, and Osborn, still maintains 

 a prominent position. 



Weismann, who was one of the chief opponents of this 

 theory, considers that ' not one of the asserted cases of 

 transmission of acquired characters will stand the test of 

 rigid scientific scrutiny '. 



* It is impossible ', he says, ' that acquired characters 

 should be transmitted, for it is inconceivable that definite 

 changes in the body or " soma " should so affect the proto- 

 plasm of the germ cells as to cause corresponding changes 

 to appear in the offspring.' 



But all these researches, which have so much occupied the 

 attention of a host of investigators for the past fifty years, 

 have not brought us any nearer to an understanding of the 

 origin of life. 



If we admit the possibility of spontaneous generation in 

 the earliest conditions of the globe, we cannot form any 

 conception of such a process we fail to comprehend the ener- 

 gizing force which originated such beginning. If we study 

 the production of the remarkable osmotic growths produced 

 by Leduc and others from inorganic salts in a colloid, we 

 cannot be sure that these curious forms, similar as they are 

 to the products of living organisms, show anything but an 

 analogy to, and are not identical with them. 



If we accept Lord Kelvin's hypothesis, ' that life may be, 

 and may have been, disseminated across the bounds of space 

 throughout the solar system and the whole universe' (7), 

 this brings us no nearer to the origin of life, and we can 



