Annual Address by the President. 
11 
to the multifold generative potentialities enclosed in the reproductive 
germ-cell, we have in explanation of them a number of ingenious theo- 
ries advanced by our foremost biologists. These theories are mostly con- 
ceived in keeping with the cell-theory. The germ-cell is thus regarded 
as having been originally a simple cell or elementary organism, whose 
substance or content has in the course of phyletic evolution become dif- 
ferentiated and developed, so as now to consist of separate and diverse 
germs for every different kind of cells to be evolved in the course of onto- 
genetic evolution. 
Darwin’s pangenic gemmules, Haeckel’s memory-endowed plastidules, 
Nageli’s clustering micellae, De Vries’ intercellular pangenes, Weis- 
mann’s germ -plasm biophores, and a number of other hypothetical vital 
units are assumed by different investigators, in order to explain the in- 
herited store of generative potentialities contained in the germ-cell, and 
to explain also the successively differentiated progeny evolved therefrom 
during ontogenetic reproduction. 
On other occasions, and also in a former paper read before this Acad- 
emy, I have at length exposed the untenabilitv of such molecular theo- 
ries. Here I will only mention the fatal flaw lurking in their very incep- 
tion. It is clear, that, if the germ-cell or the germ-plasm consists really 
of a cluster of distinct and disparate vital units, the evolution of the 
adult organism can take place only by a stupendous proliferation of the 
hypothetical vital units. Conceived as extremely minute, far beyond 
microscopical visibility, they have by means of proliferation to build up 
the comparatively enormous bulk of adult organisms. But in what way 
are they believed to multiply at such a prodigious rate? 
Spencer’s physiological units, Haeckel’s plastidules, Nageli’s micellae 
are held to originate by spontaneous generation out of nutritive material. 
[By the by, a strange assumption, this spontaneous generation of vital 
units on the part of leading evolutionists !] Darwin’s gemmules, De 
Vries’ pangenes, Weismann’s biophores, on the other hand, are declared 
to propagate by means of self-division. [How it is an obvious fact, that 
all these different kinds of vital molecules have been expressly invented,, 
mainly in order to account for the very same mysterious process of propa- 
gation, which in their case is tacitly taken for granted at so prodigious, 
a rate. To explain the vital mystery of visible propagation, this great 
mystery of the production of offspring from parent organisms has here 
been merely shifted, wholly unsolved, into hypothetical invisibility. We 
ask for an explanation of the procreation of vital beings, and receive 
as answer, that it inheres as an original property in the vital units of 
which they are composed. Helmholtz somewhere remarks, that the as- 
sumption of atoms will yield no knowledge of anything with which they 
