Herbst 249 
One notes that these theories of Herbst and His and 
other similar ones imply an extraordinary independence 
and autonomy even during ontogeny not only in each part 
of the organism but even in each cell. The development 
of each particle, even the most minute, would thus depend 
fundamentally upon the independence of its response to 
the action of its immediate or close environment, even 
though this response is given in a very definite manner 
and is in no wise arbitrary. But this is hard to reconcile 
with the mutual adaptedness which there must necessarily 
be between the different parts constituting a single co- 
ordinated whole. And it is still more irreconcilable with 
the constancy and precision with which even the most 
minute peculiarities of the organism are reproduced in 
each development, even when the conditions of the en- 
vironment in which it takes place do not always remain 
alike in respect to nutrition, temperature or other factors. 
And so much the more, since the principle of fructify- 
ing causality, employed to explain this constancy and 
rigorous precision with which the same series of onto- 
genetic phenomena is always repeated, is a sword with 
two edges. For, admitting that only a single one of the 
numberless intermediate links of the chain should find 
itself in a somewhat different condition in relation to its 
environment, or should differ in any way even though 
inconsiderably from the corresponding link of the preced- 
ing generation, a thing which one might well assert occurs 
in every ontogeny, then the remaining portions of the 
chain would find themselves, because of the modifications 
accumulating and multiplying like an avalanche, altered 
throughout, and therefore in the last links also. The 
mutual adaptedness of numberless different parts and 
their co-ordination into a single harmonious whole, and 
