Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/114

110 development it is one and the same organism; the egg is not one being and the embryo another and the adult a third, but the egg of a human being is a human being in the one-celled stage of development, and the characteristics of the adult develop out of the egg and are not in some mysterious way grafted upon it or transmitted to it.

Parents do not transmit their characters, but their germ cells, to their offspring, which germ cells in the course of long development give rise to adult characters similar to those of the parents. The thing which persists more or less completely from generation to generation is the organization of the germ cells which differentiate in similar ways in successive generations if the extrinsic factors of development remain similar.

In short, ''heredity may he defined as the particular germinal organization which is transmitted from one generation to the next: inheritance or heritage is the sum of all those qualities which are determined or caused by this germinal organization. Development is progressive and coordinated differentiation of this germinal organization, by which it is transformed into the adult organization. Differentiation is the formation and localization of many different kinds of substances out of the germinal substances, of many different structures and functions out of the relatively simple structures and functions of the oosperm.''

This germinal organization influences not merely adult characters, but also the character of every stage from the egg to the adult condition. For every inherited character, whether embryonic or adult, there is some germinal basis. We receive from our parents germ cells of a particular kind and constitution and under given conditions of environment these cells undergo regular transformations and differentiations in the course of development which differentiations lead to particular adult characteristics. In the last analysis the causes of heredity and development are problems of cell structures and functions—problems of the formation of particular kinds of germ cells, of the fusion of these cells in fertilization, and of the subsequent formation of the various types of somatic cells from the fertilized egg cell.

Observations and experiments on developed animals and plants have furnished us with a knowledge of the finished products of inheritance, but the actual stages and causes of inheritance, the real mechanisms of heredity, are to be found only in a study of the germ cells and of their development. Although many phenomena of inheritance have been discovered in the absence of any definite knowledge of the mechanism of heredity, a scientific explanation of these phenomena must wait upon the knowledge of their causes. In the absence of such knowledge it has been necessary to formulate theories of heredity to account for the facts, but these theories are only temporary scaffolding to bridge the gaps in our knowledge, and if we knew all that could be known about