CHAP, xvni A "FAIRY TALE OF SCIENCE"? 247 



the body in which it resides, under sentence of 

 "unfitness." Thus indirectly natural selection is 

 always indirect and slowly indirect processes of 

 course are slow evolution is pushed on. For in 

 this fashion germ plasm is progressively improved ; 

 and unicellular embryos, needing nothing from the 

 mother beyond nourishment 1 up to and after birth, 

 come to contain in themselves the promise and 

 potency of reason, of genius, of greatness of a 

 Shakespeare or a Darwin. A little speck of matter, 

 indistinguishable to human study from one of the 

 lowest forms of life, and essentially nothing but one 

 of these lowest forms, redistributed or regrouped, 

 contains in itself what will necessarily ("bar" the 

 accident of death) give the difference of a man from 

 a beast, of a genius from a fool, of a saint from a 

 scoundrel, or vice versa. So runs the doctrine. 



We have not yet stated Weismann's ingenious 

 theory that the germ plasm, and unicellular organisms 

 in general, are potentially immortal. Unicellular or- 

 ganisms grow by fission ; the child is a part of the 

 parent; it is impossible to say, after the split has 

 been accomplished, which is child and which is parent. 

 Both are both ; or neither is neither ! The category 

 or conception of parentage belongs to a higher sphere 

 of life, and is inapplicable here. If either survives 

 and we are assuming the continuance of the species 

 both may survive. Each member of the race is 

 potentially immortal. Never a natural death, but a 

 violent death always, must weed its ranks. If germ 



1 Heredity is equal from the two parents. It seems therefore that 

 Weismannism must be right in denying that the foetus draws anything 

 beyond nourishment from the mother organism. 



