How Somatization Reduces Germinal Capacity 85 
ontogeny is completed, for then the nuclei are always 
exposed to one specific current or to a limited group of 
specific currents peculiar to the adult state. There would 
remain over only a small or very inconsiderable number 
of those somatic elements which were acquired last and 
which would thenceforth continually increase in mass. 
The cell would thus lose by degrees its undifferentiated 
embryonic aspect, and its exclusively somatic characters 
would steadily increase. 
While according to Weismann there would be a 
fundamental distinction between the germinal nuclei set 
apart for the preservation of the entire hereditary mass, 
and the somatic nuclei which from the first would receive 
only such particles of that hereditary mass as are indis- 
pensable for their function, and the ontogenetic passage 
from one to the other would take place suddenly and 
directly at the very commencement of development; 
according to the centroepigenetic hypothesis, on the 
contrary, there would not exist any essential difference 
‘between them, because they differ from each other only 
in the number and the specificity of their respective 
potential elements, and the passage from one to the 
other would be effected gradually and slowly. And this 
transition would be due we repeat only to the constant 
acquisition by the nuclei destined to become somatic, of 
new specific potential elements, which at first are simply 
added to the germinal elements already present but finish 
by causing the latter gradually to disappear on account 
of the requirements of nutrition and space and by taking 
their place themselves. 
Without needing to have recourse to a reserve 
idioplasm, or to any other equally involved subsidiary 
hypothesis, one can explain in this way the phenomena, 
