268 



SCIENCE- GOSSIP. 



at plav with his schoolmates, noticed the same 

 characteristics that the father had displayed when 

 of the same age, and he stated that he saw himself 

 living over again in his child. 



Whence comes this heredity I We cannot regard 

 as accidental this transmission of ancestral types ; 

 but what axe the influences at work to account 

 for this strange persistency I Why should an an- 

 cestral peculiarity or weakness be absent from 

 some generations and then make its appearance in 

 a remote descendant ? Nature has certainly some 

 law to which this atavism is subservient. Its 

 persistent and well-defined recurrence camiot be 

 regarded as an accidental variation from the imme- 

 diate parental type, and some influence must be at 

 work to maintain latent for generations the pecu- 

 liarity of a former ancestor, which subsequently 

 appears in the posterity. 



In the very remote ages — long before the 

 legendary halo of history was conceived — let us 

 imagine primordial man. yet but little above some 

 of the other animals that surrounded him. When 

 the reasoning faculties commenced to dawn, he 

 must have taken some cognisance of the animals 

 and plants he met with in his peregrinations, and 

 noted the striking resemblance which the progeny 

 of the one and the offshoots of the other displayed 

 towards the parental type. Nothing, I imagine, 

 would be more apparent to his mind than that the 

 young was an exact image of the parent. It is, 

 therefore, not at all surprising to find the fixity of 

 the idea that - like begets like " is found in the 

 folklore of all nations. Theoretically we know 

 that there are no two beings exactly alike, any 

 more than there exist two plants without some 

 minor modification of their structures : but in all 

 essential particular's there is no apparent difference, 

 and the chief characteristics are transmitted, so 

 that the offspring possess the same appearance as 

 the parental type. The acorn of the oak grows 

 and becomes the oak, whilst the child develops 

 into the man, the same as the former stock, and 

 each breeds true to its kind. 



Nearly every naturalist has dealt with this 

 matter, quoting many instances in which per- 

 sistency of impressions has been transmitted by 

 the female to her offspring : but this form of 

 accidental congenital variation has in most cases 

 failed to be perpetuated unless the variation is the 

 evolution of some characteristic resulting from 

 natural selection, as shown by Darwin in his 

 •■ Origin of Species," for the better preservation of 

 the type, arising either from the disuse or modifica- 

 tion of some organ in consequence of the " struggle 

 for existence." That congenital malformations 

 are capable of transmission I do not for one 

 moment attempt to deny. A well-authenticated 

 case in point is that of a Maltese man with six 

 toes on each foot. His progeny had the mal- 

 formation of six toes on one foot transmitted to 

 the members of the male line, whilst the feet of 



the females were normal, but the latter found 

 some of their offspring ushered into the world 

 with six toes on one of their feet. 



Now it is a very remarkable fact, and none the 

 less so because it has been noted by nearly every 

 well-known biologist, that not alone peculiar forma- 

 tions, but habits and idiosyncrasies are transmitted. 

 Medical science is not at all backward in asserting 

 that tendencies to specific diseases are also faith- 

 fully transferred from the parent to the offspring, 

 and what is known as the " heredity tendency " 

 or diathesis plays a very important part in the trans- 

 mission of disease. 



It is an established fact, long since removed 

 from the debatable ground of theory, that life and 

 growth in either the animal or the vegetable world 

 — whether the lowest form of vegetable life, as 

 represented by the bacilli, or man. the highest 

 animal form — is carried on by the means of the 

 propagation of cells. The microscopic protoplasm, 

 which is regarded as the essential condition of 

 life, is but the aggregation of these cells, in each 

 of which is a nucleus for the creation of a new 

 cell. Such are the elementary conditions under 

 which life is carried on from generation to genera- 

 tion. The lower the scale of life, the more 

 simple is it. each cell producing an individual life 

 acting independently for itself, multiplying into 

 an innumerable number of other cells, each of 

 which rushes about as an individual creation, the 

 animal becoming, as one well-known writer says, 

 practically immortal. With the higher form of 

 animal existence the reproduction is delegated to 

 a special form, the ovum, and the due fertilisation 

 of this is a sine qua non for the proper development 

 of this germ-plasm into that of a highly sensitised 

 creation of the animal kingdom. 



To account for the transmissibility of ancestral 

 types. Darwin in his work on •• Pangenesis " pro- 

 mulgated a theory which, in his usual exceedingly 

 cautious manner, he stated was only advanced 

 tentatively, that each cell threw off what he desig- 

 nated " gemmules," which formed the nuclei of 

 another series of cells, whose sole destiny in the 

 economy of Nature was the propagation of its 

 species. These " gemmules " formed the blastema, 

 in which was contained an exceedingly micro- 

 scopical impression of the animal which might 

 ultimately be called into being. If this were the 

 case, some might add we should be able to submit 

 the miniature image to our investigation by means 

 of the microscope. Now. it is fully admitted that 

 the microscope has revealed to us much of the 

 mysteries of the hidden world, and we may readily 

 assume that even with some of the high-power 

 lenses used at the present day by many of our 

 investigators much is still invisible. There is 

 scarcely anything which appeals.to our imagination 

 so much as figures, and in order to explain more 

 lucidly this theory it may be advisable to have 

 recourse to them. The red corpuscles of human 





