94 THE CELL IN RELATION TO 



heredity and evolution, should have found him- 

 self irresistibly driven to look below the surface 

 of these phenomena and should have made so 

 carefully wrought an attempt to picture their 

 physical foundations to his mental vision. His 

 deep-seated conviction that sooner or later the 

 phenomena woidd have to be attacked from this 

 side is revealed in a letter written to Sir Joseph 

 Hooker, in 1868, where he declares, " I feel sure 

 that if pangenesis is stillborn it will, thank God, 

 at some future time reappear, begotten by some 

 other father and christened by some other name." 

 That this prediction still awaits fulfilment need 

 not here concern us. What is significant is the 

 attitude towards the general problem that it re- 

 veals. And the modern cytologist, therefore, de- 

 spite his failure to find support for Darwin's par- 

 ticular conception, has a right to feel that his 

 efforts to analyze the cellular mechanism of 

 heredity would be viewed with sympathetic inter- 

 est by the great naturalist could he follow their 

 progress at the present time. 



Pangenesis was put forward many years after 

 Virchow had pronounced his celebrated apho- 

 rism " Omnis cellula e cellula" (which Darwin 

 quotes) , and a full decade after the eminent Ger- 

 man pathologist had insisted on the " eternal 

 law " of genetic continuity by cell-division. Dar- 

 win nevertheless admitted this law unreservedly 

 only in the case of plants, and went no further 

 than to recognize its wide prevalence among ani- 



