Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/244

240 is an inference from innumerable facts and series of phenomena, all of which are bound up together and rendered intelligible by the theory of common descent. We therefore find that the founders of theories of evolution turn to individual development as the court of last. resort, as the place where evolution may be detected in actual process. For here is found the link that binds successive generations, here variations arise, whether they be mutations or of the ordinary fluctuating kind, whether they be germinal or acquired; here in the individual life history the Lamarckian must look for the reflection of the experiences of the individual back upon the germ; here the adherents of orthogenesis must find their crucial evidence.

In his theory of natural selection Darwin accepted as given the data of individual development. But he saw clearly that the fundamental phenomena of heredity and variation had their seat in the individual development, and he experienced the need of framing a conception that would bind together the phenomena of hybridization, the various forms of variation, atavism, telegony, regeneration, inheritance of acquired characters and the like; and in his volumes on "Animals and Plants under Domestication" he framed the provisional hypothesis of pangenesis to include them all. I shall not attempt to present the details of this theory, but I may be permitted to say that, as a matter of logical arrangement of the assumed data, under the circumstances of existing biological conceptions and of the state of knowledge of the time, the theory was well worthy of its illustrious founder. In its way, it was as original as the theory of natural selection, though some of its fundamental ideas had certainly been anticipated by previous writers.

Nor shall I attempt a critical estimate of the value of the theory in the history of science; but I may be permitted to call attention to certain features. In the first place, the theory was overburdened with certain unnecessary conceptions such as inheritance of acquired characters, atavism and telegony. The elimination of these conceptions immensely simplifies the theory of individual development. In the second place, it rested upon a fundamental conception, that of representative particles, which amounts to a denial of the reality of individual development. And in the third place, it assumed certain biological processes—the existence of specific vital particles of ultramicroscopic dimensions, their radiation from parent cells, and their aggregation in other specific cells in a definite architectural pattern—for which there is not only entire absence of evidence, but which are wholly inconsistent with the known facts of cellular physiology. For these reasons the theory had only provisional importance, as indeed Darwin recognized in naming it the provisional hypothesis of pangenesis.

The determinant hypothesis of Weismann, contained in his theory