260 Theories Treating of Inheritance 



protoplasm during the whole course of phylogeny, would 

 nevertheless not cease on that account to constitute still 

 a special dynamic state which is quite different from the 

 preceding ones, and which cannot possibly preserve 

 materially even the smallest trace of them. Therefore 

 this theory of Cope leaves the repetition of phylogeny 

 by ontogeny quite as incomprehensible as did that of 

 Haeckel. And on the other hand one cannot see how 

 the protoplasm could be in the same identical dynamic 

 state in all the most different parts of the soma and yet 

 give rise to specific biologic phenomena correspondingly 

 different in each of these parts. 



It would have been on the contrary a much more 

 suggestive idea, had Cope sought to reduce all the dif- 

 ferent, contemporaneous, physiological and morphological 

 variations of the organism, not so much to a single 

 and everywhere uniform change of this given growth 

 energy, as rather to numerous specific variations of a 

 single generic form of energy, so that the latter would 

 thus represent to a certain extent the common denom- 

 inator of all these unlike morphological and physiological 

 variations. For this is in any case one of the means 

 which every theory must employ which essays to explain 

 the inheritance of acquired characters. For when once 

 all variations of the most manifold forms of energy, 

 acting simultaneously upon the most different points of 

 the organism, are attributed to as many specific varia- 

 tions of a single form of energy as the basis common 

 to all of them, then it would be easy to combine with 

 it the conception that for each complex state of the 

 organism there might appear in the germ a single, well 

 defined specific mode of being of this common form of 

 energy, as the resultant of all these specific different modes 



