152 Inadmissibility of Preformistic Germs 



The consequence of this has been that the problem has 

 become enormously complicated because it has given birth 

 to this other very great problem: How comes it that 

 these sixty trillions of autonomous and therefore inde- 

 pendent individual parts can constitute a complete and 

 harmonious whole? 



It results from this that preformistic germs, which by 

 themselves are quite inadmissible, become yet more so 

 when they are separated from preformistic doctrines 

 properly so called. And Weismann endeavored to show 

 that they are inseparable. 



"DeVries," he says, "once mentions the zebra stripes. 

 How can such a character be transmissible if in the germ 

 the different pangens are free one beside another, without 

 being bound up into firm groups inheritable as such? 

 Zebra-pangens cannot give it, for the striping of the zebra 

 is no cell character. Perhaps there are pangens which for 

 brevity we can call "whites" or "blacks/' whose presence 

 would produce white or black color in the cell. But the 

 striping of the zebra does not consist in the development 

 of the black or of the white in the interior of the cell, but 

 rather in regular alternations of thousands of black 

 or white cells arranged so as to form stripes." 



"DeVries mentions also the long stemmed variety of 

 the alpine Primula acaulis occasionally produced by 

 atavistic return to a remote stem form. Here again the 

 character of the long stem cannot be due to 'long stem 

 pangens/ because the long stem is not an intracellular 

 property ; neither is the specific form of the leaves, etc. ; the 

 dentate border of a leaf cannot be due to the presence of 

 'dentate pangens/ but is due to a special arrangement of 

 the marginal cells. The same is true of nearly all the 

 characters which we designate as visible properties of the 



