72 Indications of a Central Zone of Development 
group of these centers, perhaps on account of some 
special situation, to become, in the course or at the end of 
the particular centroepigenesis producing the different 
parts of the flower, and in relation to all the other centers 
and so to the whole flower, the director to a further de- 
velopment; so that there would be present for the whole 
development of the flower, or for a part of it-at least, a 
centroepigenesis of the second degree. 
By analogy one can conceive also of the possibility of 
other centroepigeneses of still higher degrees (composite 
flowers, etc.). 
“Tt may appear,” writes Le Dantec, “that the sexual 
individual belongs to a higher order than the asexual in- 
dividual and may originate from the individualization of 
an association of parts which are like asexual individuals, 
It occurs perhaps in the Medusae; it is certain in Phane- 
rogams. A flower corresponds morphologically to an 
assemblage in a fixed form, of parts which are like the 
asexual individuals of the plant. Goethe had already 
noted this peculiarity. The asexual individual of a plant 
is the internode with its leaf and auxillary bud: flowers 
are much more complex.” *° 
Centroepigeneses of a second or higher grade could 
thus serve to explain the transformation of simple colonies 
of individuals, (e. g., of the ancestors of the present 
echinoderms), into complicated organisms, which tend 
steadily toward an individualization of their own. One 
could explain easily the transformation, for example, of 
the original individuals of the colony, becoming more and 
more differentiated from one another, into the organs of 
this organism (siphonophores). With the growth of 
“Le Dantec: Traité de Biologie. Paris, Alcan, 1903, P. 413. 
