306 DARWINISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF LIFE 



thus constitutes the persistent ground-work of the 

 changing forms of life. 



Hence the germ-cells are the main trunk of the 

 organic world. In them are contained the basic par- 

 ticles ; and as these vary they give birth to ever-new 

 forms of life. If the new variation is useful in the 

 struggle for life, the animal is preserved, and with it 

 the germ-cells. These produce their kind, in unbroken 

 continuity, and so continue their life - creating action. 

 It is the germ-cells that vary of themselves, and so 

 determine the whole variability of organisms. The 

 body-cells cannot affect them ; they merely represent 

 the house which, by its superiority or inferiority of 

 structure (which, however, it owes to the germ-cells), 

 enables them to continue their course, or suffers them 

 to be cut off.^ 



As each germ-cell forms another germ-cell, together 

 with the organism, this does the same, and the process 

 may go on indefinitely, there seems to be something 

 immortal in the germ-cell. How is it with the protozoa ? 

 In these the body and the germ are one ; the germ-cell 



^ There is a novel of Grant Allen's, " A Terrible Inheritance," in 

 which a young man suddenly remembers certain details in the life of 

 his mother before marriage, and the youthful escapades of his father, 

 without having been told anything about them. The story is, to some 

 extent, an attempt at a practical application of the Lamarckian prin- 

 ciple, and really amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of it. While the 

 youth was merely a germ-cell in the mother's ovary — and in the father 

 — she is supposed to have suffered a powerful emotion that was deeply 

 imprinted on her. The germ-cell is supposed to have been influenced 

 in the same way. The cell shared the experience in a sense, and its 

 memory-elements are supposed to have been so acted upon that when 

 the cell became a human being, he could recall the conduct of the 

 mother. 



