CHAPTER XV 



HEREDITY. NATURAL AND ACQUIRED 

 VARIATIONS 



The first question to be dealt with here is the Transmission 

 of Parental Structure and Characters to the Offspring, and 

 we shall do no more than bring forward the following broad 

 conclusions we have arrived at ; conclusions which need 

 not be at variance with Mendelian evidence. Based on 

 the supposition that all living Individuals are multicellular, 

 our theory may be thus shortly stated : — 



The zygote, or fertilised ovum, with which the living 

 Individual starts, has latent or potential in it the lost plans 

 or identities of the originally combining elements ; and the 

 complete Individual is all the cells which must necessarily 

 be produced by repeated acts of division for the complete 

 restoration or reproduction of the lost identities or plans : 

 this in the manner, and to the (multiple) degree, possible 

 for the Individual type in question in the absence or presence 

 of Arrest. If we regard the growth-cycle as an enormous 

 and complicated definite series of " reactions," it is obvious 

 that any renewed combination of such restored or reproduced 

 sexual elements will, all things being equal, have to result 

 in the same multicellular product as composed the original 

 Individual. The multicellular product, including the restored 

 elements, represents the Individual, in all but the humblest 

 types of Continuity where the complete Individual is a 

 multiple of gametes, and intervening stages are evanescent. 

 And it is such types which point to the true significance of 

 the term Heredity, for they show us two entities fusing to 

 reappear again in multiples after many reactions. Here 

 there is no " transmission " of parental structure in the 

 sense of a comparatively enduring cell-mass. There is, it 

 is true, at any moment of " parental " development, a given 

 number of asexual unicellular organisms, but each of these 



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