DIRECT EQUILIBRATION: EPITOME 71 



also inherited, indications that new properties gained by the 

 germ cells can also be inherited. 



(vii.) The generative system is embryogenetically related to 

 the endocrine system, and is profoundly influenced by the internal 

 secretions of that system. The indications are that influences 

 from without affecting the organs of internal secretion and 

 modifying their secretions may through the hormones, etc. of 

 the internal secretions so influence the germ cells that the off- 

 spring are affected in the same direction as the parent, and that 

 thus acquired metabolic disturbances in the parent, whether 

 of the nature of defects or acquirements, are capable of being 

 inherited. 



To the academic biologist the suggestion of a direct action 

 of external agencies as the prime cause of variation is as shock- 

 ing and as improper as would be the suggestion of a risque 

 story to some dear and prim old maiden lady. To the biologist 

 of to-day 1 the conclusions above noted are heterodoxy pure 

 and simple. And yet it is along these lines that medical research 

 is surely leading us. And what is more, these conclusions 

 harmonize with the experiences that come to us day after day 

 in studying our patients and their families. 



THE MORPHOLOGICAL CONCEPT OF UNIT PROPERTIES 



Believing that we are in the right, where is it that the 

 biologists have gone wrong ? 



1 I admit that this is too sweeping a statement. It was written with a vivid 

 memory of my correspondence with Sir Ray Lankester a few months previously, 

 and the attitude taken by him. 



I do not think I can be accused of unduly advertising my wares or of too keen 

 a desire to claim priority when I have allowed sixteen years to elapse before 

 calling the attention of biologists in general to my address of 1901 (here repub- 

 lished in Part II.). The conclusions then reached by me regarding metabolites, 

 and, as we subsequently became accustomed to term them, hormones, and their 

 influence on the germ cells, have since then been enunciated by several prominent 

 biologists, by Heape, Bourne, Cunningham, MacBride, and Dendy, although 

 in each case without note of my earlier contribution, which, it should be added, 

 appeared not in an obscure local periodical, but in a leading organ of the medical 

 profession under a title that had no uncertain sound. The only British biologist 

 who to my knowledge has referred to my views is Professor Arthur Thomson 

 (Heredity, London, John Murray, 1912), but he also appears to be unaware that 

 I preceded Professor Yves Delage by some two years in offering a physico- 

 chemical hypothesis in place of determinants. On p. 454 he dismisses the 

 subject by stating : " We find ourselves quite unable to entertain (the view) that 

 it is possible to dispense with any postulate of representative particles." 



