314 Explanation of Inheritance 
is therefore easy to imagine, above all if we recollect 
that the central zone would be just one part,—the least 
differentiated part of this system, that for each one of 
these complex modes of being of the nervous configura- 
tion constituting a given instinct there must correspond 
in the central zone itself its respective specific potential 
element, and this latter becoming active later in the next 
following ontogeny as soon as the general nervous con- 
figuration again becomes like that which was present at 
the moment immediately preceding that in which this 
element was formed in the parent, must be capable of 
so modifying this configuration as to make it acquire 
the same instinct which the nervous configuration of 
the parent had acquired by the action of external 
influences. 
If now we draw a conclusion from all that we have 
said thus far, we can very well assert that the attempt 
{o account by means of the centroepigenetic hypothesis, 
for the Lamarckian principle in all its manifold and 
comprehensive manifestations has not failed. One notes 
also that this hypothesis can be assigned to the class of 
mnemonic theories of heredity, but with this important 
difference, that the theories of Haeckel, Hertwig, Orr, 
Cope, and other similar ones, in order to explain the 
phenomenon of the inheritance of acquired characters 
appearing during development, have recourse to a phe- 
nomenon still more special and more complex, the 
mnemonic, and therefore do not and cannot constitute 
any real explanation. Centroepigenesis on the contrary, 
as we saw utilizes as subordinate hypothesis a very 
general and very simple biological phenomenon, which 
in many respects indeed is like certain phenomena of 
the accumulation of energy in the inorganic world, and 
