THE HEREDITY OF RICHARD ROE. 121 
Within the narrowest type there is room for an almost 
infinite play in the minor variations. For almost any 
possible one of these, Richard Roe could find warrant 
in his ancestry. His combination of them must be his 
own. That is his individuality. Colour of the eyes and 
hair, length of nose, hue of skin, form of ears, size of 
hands, character of thumb prints, in all these and ten 
thousand other particulars some allotment must fall to 
Richard Roe. 
He must have some combination of his own, for 
Nature has “broken the die” in moulding each of his 
ancestors, and will tolerate no servile copy of any of 
her works. By the law of sex, Richard Roe has twice 
as many ancestors as his father or mother had. There- 
fore these could give him anything they had severally 
received from their own parents. The hereditary gifts 
must be divided in some way, else Richard Roe would 
be speedily overborne by them. Furthermore, any 
system of division Nature may adopt could only be on 
the average an equal division. Richard Roe’s father 
might supply half his endowment of inborn characters, 
his mother furnishing the other half. Nature tries to 
arrange for some partition like this. But she can never 
divide evenly, and some qualities will not bear division. 
Richard Roe’s share forms a sort of mosaic, made partly 
of unchanged characters standing side by side in new 
combinations, partly a mixture of characters, and part 
of characters in perfect blending. 
The physical reason for all this the physiologists are 
just beginning to trace. The machinery of division and 
integration they find in the germ cell 
itself—the egg and its male cognate. 
At the same time they find that Nature’s love of varia- 
tion is operative even here. She has never yet made 
two eggs or two sperm cells exactly alike. 
t 
The germ cell. 
