60 Hypothetical Bearers of Specific Characters 



tail, the more we shall find that their efficiency lies in that 

 implicitly made assumption, while their difficulties arise 

 mostly through the other hypotheses. If, for the present, 

 we consider the material bearers of the individual charac- 

 ters, out of which we must imagine the physiological units, 

 the ancestral plasms, and the idioplasm to be composed, as 

 their elements, then the assumption of such elements is in 

 itself sufficient to explain the fact of heredity. The pre- 

 vailing resemblance of children to one of the parents, and 

 the phenomena of atavism become thereby comprehensi- 

 ble without any further assumptions. 



The consequence which Spencer and Weismann em- 

 phasize as a necessity of their theory, namely the reduc- 

 tion of the number of units, (which, according to the 

 former, results through mutual repulsion, according to 

 the latter, through the polar bodies), is a difficulty which 

 arises from the union of the "elements," assumed by both 

 thinkers, and not from the assumption of the elements 

 themselves. If we discard the grouping of the elements 

 into units or ancestral plasms, such a reduction becomes 

 quite superfluous, because the individual elements can ar- 

 range themselves, after the fertilization in the egg, in a 

 similar manner as previously in the egg and in the sperm- 

 cell. And the phenomena of so-called specific atavism, in 

 which species preserve latent characteristics which they 

 have inherited from their ancestors, as, for example, the 

 Primula acaulis caulescens, show that latent characters 

 need not be thrown off, but may be preserved through 

 thousands of generations. In the idioplasm the firm union 

 of the "elements" is most strongly worked out, and it is 

 precisely in that point that every attempt fails to make the 

 theory harmonize with the phenomena of fertilization and 

 hybridization. For these processes teach us that hered- 



