138 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 
from abundance to privation, while the male organs are 
transplanted in a starving condition into the midst of exactly 
that kind of nourishment which they will have the least 
difficulty of assimilating, because it was formed by an indi- 
vidual of the same species. 
Sooner or later the “directly” available nourishment is 
used up, and the activities of both the male and female 
organs will be called forth to the same extent; their union 
results, and the new combination of organs leads to a special 
activity, to the division of the cell. 
By the above condensed account of the phenomena of 
fecundation, I wanted to show that— 
(1) In an offspring all “cell organs” are directly transmitted ; 
(2) These organs will tend to rearrange themselves in such a 
way as to give the offspring the same organisation as 
that possessed by either parent. : 
With these two premises it is not difficult to see why an 
offspring resembles its parents, for both progenitors and 
descendants have the same organic constitution, which forces 
them to exhibit the same phenomena during life. Why the 
offspring may differ from its ancestors is another question, 
and this I shall attempt to explain afterwards when alluding 
to the higher forms of organic existence. 
THE ORGANISATION OF METAZOA AND METAPHYTA. 
As we ascend the scale of life we meet with species 
consisting of more than one cell; from Protozoa and Proto- 
phyta we pass on to Metazoa and Metaphyta; but what 
factors played a part in bringing about this evolution is one 
of the most difficult problems a biologist can encounter. I 
am fully aware of the impossibility of settling this question, 
but I hope that the suggestion I am about to offer may bring 
us a step nearer the solution. 
We saw how complicated an organisation belongs even 
to the lowest forms of life, and that the various organs in 
individual cells occur in multiple numbers, e.y., the chromatin 
segments of the nucleus are at least two in number, as in 
