Hyatt.] 70 [April 5, 
needle's eye, bat must also account for putting the numberless 
characters derived from the entire caravan of its immediate pro- 
genitors and remote wild ancestors and their progenitors back to 
the oi-igin of their phylum, through the same narrow tunnel. 
This physical difficulty is still further enhanced by the fact that 
the ova and spermatozoa do not increase in size in proportion 
to the increasing number of characters transmitted. 
One has to imagine the corpuscles and all this active circulation 
and concentration taking place invisibly and yet requiring visible 
vehicles of transmission in the minute spermatozoon and nucleus 
of the ovum. Then he must picture their redistribution over the 
body of the offspring, the larger number remaining latent until 
the proper time arrives for them, and then locating themselves and 
coming out in exactly the right place, or repeating at the right 
time some tendency or habit of the ancestors. These appalling 
difficulties rest upon an original assumption that has to be 
projiped up by a series of secondary hypotheses, not one of which 
offers a single visual fact to justify its invention. 
Granting the existence of gemmules, biophors, or pangenes, is a 
mental process that places the whole history of organisms out- 
side of the laws of motion that have been observed in all inor- 
ganic bodies. It makes the entire phenomena of evolution 
depend upon the shooting out of a mass of organic small shot 
from the primitive protoplasm of the earliest times, with a force as 
inconceivable as are the ways and means of their transmission, to 
the targets in the ova and spermatozoa of existing animals. All of 
this is asked upon the ground that some form of gemmule 
must exist because this is the only mode in which characteristics 
can be transmitted. 
So far as I can ascertain, the supporters of corpuscular theories 
do not seem to be aware that there is another imaginable hypothe- 
sis worthy of their attention, or at any rate do not discuss an^- 
other. Nevertheless there is one now over twenty years of age 
which has been supported by eminent naturalists and which has 
strong claims to serious consideration. 
Ewald Ilering^ was the first to maintain the close similarity 
between the functions of memory and heredity, and to try to 
1 T'eberdas f^ediklitniss als cine allgemeine function der organisirten inaterie. Wien. 
Almanach, v. 20, p. 253-278, 1870; Arch. sci. phys. et. nat. Geneve, v. 40, p. 190-192, 
1871. Translated in Tlie open eourt, Chicaffo, v. 1, nos. 6, 7,1887. 
