414 



TRANSMISSION 



meets it by assuming that the characters that distinguish the higher 

 races were in some way impressed upon the original protoplasm 

 from without, while the remote ancestors were yet in the single- 

 celled stage. Thus do the most radical " selectionists " become 

 Lamarckians of the purest kind when driven far enough back. 1 



But is this violent assumption necessary ? Life in the single- 

 celled stage is not fundamentally different from life in the colony 

 form. A cell is a cell in either case, and its activity what it 

 can do is dependent partly upon its ancestry and partly upon 

 the conditions of life, which are its opportunities. To be sure, 

 the single cell is more dependent upon the external world, and 

 reacts more completely to temperature and other external forces, 

 than does the larger colony of highly specialized units (cells), 

 but this is a difference in degree rather than in kind. 



In the last analysis we are driven to the conclusion either 

 that all characters were created and implanted in the original 

 protoplasm, so that living matter, even in its simplest form, 

 has all the potentialities of the highest form of life, or else 

 that the peculiar chemical compounds that constitute living mat- 

 ter are able not only to enter into definite relations with the 

 world at large, but also, perhaps, to effect, from time to time, 

 new combinations among themselves, thus acquiring new or 

 greatly modified characters, sometimes conforming naturally to 

 surrounding conditions, sometimes not. To this latter view the 

 writer strongly inclines. 



A chemical element, as iron, acquires no new characters, 

 though it behaves differently under different circumstances. 

 Sulphur is extremely sensitive to surrounding conditions, and 

 many of the organic compounds depend almost entirely for their 

 properties upon the conditions under which their peculiar com- 

 binations were effected. 



But when life enters the field all the complications are infi- 

 nitely multiplied, and when we are driven to the last ditch all 

 must agree that the characters possessed by living matter are 

 to a large extent and in some way an expression of the condi- 

 tions of life. How these conditions impress themselves not only 

 upon the individual but also upon the race is, in some cases at 



1 Weismann, Germ Plasm, pp. 415-416. 



