84 Hypothesis of Structure of Germ Substance 



ferentiated as it is through the division of labor, can 

 receive to a certain extent the stamp of local character." 54 



If we admit that each new specific current while 

 passing through a nucleus deposits there the substance 

 which was capable of producing it, and which would be 

 capable on occasion of reproducing this same specific 

 current, a hypothesis of which we reserve a better 

 exposition till later, we can conceive of nuclear soma- 

 tization as a gradual and constant acquisition of new, 

 specific, potential, somatic elements. 



The fact that each cell, as long as its differentiation 

 has not progressed too far, can upon occasion, provided 

 it be isolated from its neighbors, arise to the rank of a 

 germinal cell, appears to indicate that these new somatic 

 elements, thus gradually acquired, would from the start 

 be simply added to the germinal elements already existing, 

 without altering them at all, but merely relegating them 

 to the potential state, from which, under normal 

 conditions, they would not again emerge. 



In other terms we must suppose that all the germinal 

 elements remain unaltered in the nuclei undergoing 

 somatization as long as the number or the mass of 

 acquired somatic elements does not progress beyond a 

 given limit. 



But when this limit is once passed, then the require- 

 ments of nutrition or of space would cause the different 

 germinal elements to disappear gradually, and the nucleus 

 concerned would thus lose all generative capacity. 



Further even those somatic elements, which each 

 nucleus acquired one after another at each successive 

 stage of development, will gradually disappear after 



"Oscar Hertwig : Zeit- und Streitfragen der Biologic. Praforma- 

 tion oder Epigenese? Jena, Fischer, 1894. P. 142 143. 



