260 Theories Treating of Inheritance 
protoplasm during the whole course of phylogeny, would 
nevertheless not cease on that account to constitute still 
a special dynamic state which is quite different from the 
preceding ones, and which cannot possibly preserve 
materially even the smallest trace of them. Therefore 
this theory of Cope leaves the repetition of phylogeny 
by ontogeny quite as incomprehensible as did that of 
Haeckel. And on the other hand one cannot see how 
the protoplasm could be in the same identical dynamic 
state in all the most different parts of the soma and yet 
give rise to specific biologic phenomena correspondingly 
different in each of these parts. 
It would have been on the contrary a much more 
suggestive idea, had Cope sought to reduce all the dif- 
ferent, contemporaneous, physiological and morphological 
variations of the organism, not so much to a single 
and everywhere uniform change of this given growth 
energy, as rather to numerous specific variations of a 
single generic form of energy, so that the latter would 
thus represent to a certain extent the common denom- 
inator of all these unlike morphological and physiological 
variations. For this is in any case one of the means 
which every theory must employ which essays to explain 
the inheritance of acquired characters. For when once 
all variations of the most manifold forms of energy, 
acting simultaneously upon the most different points of 
the organism, are attributed to as many specific varia- 
tions of a single form of energy as the basis common 
to all of them, then it would be easy to combine with 
it the conception that for each complex state of the 
organism there might appear in the germ a single, well 
defined specific mode of being of this common form of 
energy, as the resultant of all these specific different modes 
