NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 
It is but natural that out of all tne 
intimate relationship he has borne to Nature 
and out of all his many years of intense 
study of her inner life upon so grand a scale, 
he should have reached certain well-defined 
theories. One of these pertains to heredity, 
a term at best vague, which has been loosely 
held. Out of the years of his investigations, 
carried on upon such a colossal scale, he has 
established the principle that heredity is 
“the sum of all the effects of all the en- 
vironment of all past generations, on the re- 
sponsive, ever-moving life forces; or, in other 
words, a record kept by the vital Principle 
of its struggle onward and upward from 
simple forms of life; not vague in any re- 
spect, but indelibly fixed by repetition.” 
He condenses this into the statement: 
Heredity is the sum of all past environment. 
Heredity now becomes something far 
different from what it had before been held 
to be. “Every plant, animal and planet,” he 
holds, “occupies its place in the order of 
Nature by the action of two forces,—the 
inherent constitutional life-force with all its 
acquired habits, the sum of which is heredity ; 
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