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So that each ovum when impregnate should be considered not as descended from its ancestors, but as being a continuation of the personality of every ovum in the chain of its ancestry, which every ovum IT ACTUALLY IS quite as truly as the octogenarian IS the same identity with the ovum from which he has been developed.
Or, perhaps, more seriously, the memory of every impregnate ovum from which every ancestor of a mule, for example, has sprung, has reverted to a very long period of time during which its forefathers have been creatures like that which it is itself now going to become: thus, the impregnate ovum from which the mule's father was developed remembered nothing but horse memories; but it felt its faith in these supported by the recollection of a VAST NUMBER of previous generations, in which it was, to all intents and purposes, what it now is.
So, if the development of an embryo is due to memory, we should suppose the memory of the impregnate ovum to revert not to yesterday, when it was in the persons of its parents, but to the last occasion on which it was an impregnate ovum.
This head consists almost entirely of the nuclear material which is supposed to determine the characters of the future individual. The ovum or egg contributed by the mother is much larger nearly round in shape and about 1/120 of an inch in diameter.
The purpose of the attachment is twofold, namely, to anchor the ovum, and to arrange channels by which, on the one hand, nutriment may reach the embryo, and, on the other, its waste products may return to the mother.
These three phenomena are creations, i.e., a disposition of certain materials following a determinate type. In the first case, the ovum after fertilization is subject to a rigorously determined evolution whence arises such and such an individual with its specific and personal characters, its hereditary influences, etc.
The fertilization of the ovum in the female is called conception; its growing state is called gestation, and its birth, on becoming a separate being, is called parturition. In its growing condition, and before its birth, the new young life form is known as the foetus. How this is brought about is substantially as follows: As already stated, the infertile ovum, or egg, is produced by the woman.
These two processes lead to a reduction in the number of chromosomes, so that finally every human germinal cell contains twelve, and therefore when the ovum is fertilized the characteristic number twenty-four is restored.
It is equally true, as we shall see in the next chapter, that the nucleus of the ovum and the nucleus alone transmits maternal qualities. The material which conveys inheritable characters can be seen and has been identified in both germinal cells; from each of them the fertilized ovum derives equal amounts.
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