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Modern researches have shown that the nucleus, when the cell divides, assumes the form of a spindle of fibres, associated with which are distinct bodies called chromosomes, that the number of these chromosomes where it can be counted is constant for all individuals of the same species, and that before the gametes are ready for fertilisation two cell-divisions take place, which result in the reduction of the number of chromosomes to half the original number.
The Mendelians used to say it was impossible to believe in the heredity of somatic modifications due to external conditions, because it was impossible to conceive of any means by which such modifications could affect the constitution of the chromosomes in the gametes within the modified body.
The smaller eggs develop without fertilisation, by parthenogenesis, and become males. Here then we have three kinds of gametes, large eggs, small eggs, and sperms, each with the same number of chromosomes. It is not the mere number then which makes the difference, but we find a segregation in the ova into what may for convenience be called female ova and male ova.
Just as the old embryologists conceived the adult individual to be contained with all its organs to the most minute details within the protoplasm of the fertilised ovum or one of the gametes, so the modern Mendelian, because he is unable to conceive or to obtain the evidence of the gradual development of a hereditary factor, conceives all the hereditary factors of the whole animal kingdom packed in infinite complexity within the protoplasm of the primordial living cells.
He has not only studied the chromosomes in the gametes of this fly, and made Mendelian crosses with it, but has obtained numerous mutations, so that his work is a very important contribution to the mutation doctrine. Drosophila in the hands of Professor Morgan and his students and colleagues has thus become as classical a type as Oenothera in those of the botanical mutationists.
One of each pair goes into one daughter-cell and the other into the other, but not all maternal into one and all paternal into the other. Thus each daughter-cell after the first or heterotypic division in normal cases contains 7 chromosomes. A second homotypic division takes place in which each chromosome splits into two as in somatic divisions, and thus we have 4 gametes with 7 chromosomes each.
But since these qualities segregate in the reduction divisions, how is it that the male quality in the f ovum does not make it a sperm? We are asked to conceive a quality, or the absence of a factor, in an ovum which is incapable of causing that ovum to be a sperm, but which, when segregated in the gametes descended from that ovum, causes them all to be sperms.
A dominant is something present which is absent in the recessive: the rose comb is due to a factor which is absent from the single. The two segregate in the gametes of the hybrid or heterozygote, and if a recessive gamete is fertilised by another recessive gamete the single comb reappears.
From him we learned to think of the ova or sperms, of the reproductive cells or 'gametes' of an individual, as cells which were from an early stage of development distinguished from the cells forming the organs and tissues; to regard the organism as consisting of soma on the one hand and gametes on the other, both derived from the original zygote cell, not the gametes from the soma.
or heterozygote dominants and pure recessives in equal numbers. It is evident that the reproduction of the sexes is very similar to this. One of the remarkable facts about sex is that, although the uniting gametes are male and female yet they give rise to males and females in equal numbers. If one sex were a dominant this would be in accordance with Mendelian theory.
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