Recent Advances in the Study of Heredity. 161 
and Plants under Domestication.” The theory of Pangenesis 
commits Charles Darwin to a conception of the relation between 
successive generations of organisms, in which the soma occupies 
a primary and foremost position, inasmuch as Darwin starts 
with the soma, and directs his theory to the solution of the 
problem how the characters of an organism get into the germ-cells 
which it produces. The subordinate position which the germ 
occupies in Charles Darwin’s theory may be expressed by the 
statement that according to him the egg is the means or channel 
whereby one hen produces another. The subordinate position 
which the soma occupies in the conception of inheritance which we 
believe to be true to-day may be expressed by the saying, which 
Butler quotes, that a hen is merely an egg’s way of producing 
another egg. The modern view (see The Third Period, p. 163) is 
also expressed by Michael Foster in the opening paragraph of the 
Chapter on Death in the fourth edition of his text-book of Physiology 
which was published in 1884, a year before the publication of 
Weismann’s Continuity of the Germ-Plasm. “When the animal 
kingdom is surveyed from a broad standpoint, it becomes obvious 
that the ovum, or its correlative the spermatozoon, is the goal of an 
individual existence : that life is a cycle beginning in an ovum and 
coming round to an ovum again. The greater part of the actions 
which, looking from a near point of view at the higher animals 
alone, we are apt to consider as eminently the purposes for which 
animals come into existence, when viewed from the distant outlook 
whence the whole living world is surveyed, fade away into the 
likeness of the mere by-play of ovum-bearing organisms. The 
animal-body is in reality a vehicle for ova ; and after the life of the 
parent has become potentially renewed in the offspring, the body 
remains as a cast-off envelope whose future is but to die.” 
I have laid especial emphasis on the fact that Darwin in his 
theory of inheritance started with the soma and sought to explain 
how its characters were impressed on the germ-cells which it carries, 
because this fact has influenced the history of the interpretation of 
heredity far more profoundly than is commonly recognized. The 
theory of heredity which was almost universally, though tacitly, 
held by naturalists and breeders during the last decades of the 19th 
century owes its essential features to Darwin’s “ somatic ” view of 
the matter. This theory was that the characters of a given 
generation were determined, in a diminishing degree as the progenitors 
became more remote, by the characters of theirparents, grandparents, 
