152 Inadmissibility of Prefornustic Germs 
The consequence of this has been that the problem has 
become enormously complicated because it has given birth 
to this other very great problem: How comes it that 
these sixty trillions of autonomous and therefore inde- 
pendent individual parts can constitute a complete and 
harmonious whole? 
It results from this that preformistic germs, which by 
themselves are quite inadmissible, become yet more so 
when they are separated from preformistic doctrines 
properly so called. And Weismann endeavored to show 
that they are inseparable. 
“DeVries,” he says, ‘once mentions the zebra stripes. 
How can such a character be transmissible if in the germ 
the different pangens are free one beside another, without 
being bound up into firm groups inheritable as such? 
Zebra-pangens cannot give it, for the striping of the zebra 
is no cell character. Perhaps there are pangens which for 
brevity we can call “whites” or “blacks,” whose presence 
would produce white or black color in the cell. But the 
striping of the zebra does not consist in the development 
of the black or of the white in the interior of the cell, but 
rather in regular alternations of thousands of black 
or white cells arranged so as to form stripes.” 
“DeVries mentions also the long stemmed variety of 
the alpine Primula acaulis occasionally produced by 
atavistic return to a remote stem form. Here again the 
character of the long stem cannot be due to ‘long stem 
pangens,’ because the long stem is not an intracellular 
property ; neither is the specific form of the leaves, etc. ; the 
dentate border of a leaf cannot be due to the presence of 
‘dentate pangens,’ but is due to a special arrangement of 
the marginal cells. The same is true of nearly all the 
characters which we designate as visible properties of the 
