Instincts and Particulate Inheritance 151 
ticular instinct, that there is a pangen or a group of 
pangens for the instinct of the hunting dog, that there is 
a determinant or group of determinants of the instinct of 
the new-born chick, which knows already how to peck at 
the wheat and swallow it? How can we conceive of these 
instincts which are the consequences of very complicated 
combinations and interconnections of almost innumerable 
centers and nerve tracts, as due to one separate germ, 
which having come up at the opportune moment of on- 
togeny, and at the exact point of the organism, produccs 
them by itself, automatically, and we may say independ- 
ently of all the rest of the organism already formed? 
And yet these instincts actually constitute variable 
and inheritable peculiarities of the organism, susceptible 
of being present or absent independently of all the other 
peculiarities of the organism. But if, in order to explain 
this “particulate inheritance” one has recourse to germs 
especially preformed just for this, would this constitute 
anything else than a purely verbal explanation without 
any real inherent significance? 
“A man, for example,’’ Le Dantec very rightly says, 
“Gs composed of about sixty trillions of cells, and he is 
nevertheless reproduced by sexual elements of very small 
size: this is the phenomenon to be explained. It has been 
thought that the difficulty would be less, or at least would 
not appear so distinctly, if one were to divide the problem 
into sixty trillion parts, if one could replace the reproduc- 
tion of the man by sixty trillions partial reproductions ; 
and there have been consequently imagined infinitely 
small particles which are to the cells as the whole germinal 
substance is to the man.” 17% 
1287 e Dantez: Traité de Biologie. P, 224—225. 
