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Updated: May 15, 2025
This difficulty of understanding how the germ plasm can be affected by external conditions has led one school of biologists to deny that it is subject to any variation by external conditions, and hence that all modification of the germ plasm must come from some other source.
Now that I have seen this growth in the magter's skull, I can think of a positive parallel. The fly Drepanosiphum also had a large green organ, only it fills half of the body cavity instead of the head. Its identity puzzled biologists for years, and they had a number of complex theories to explain it. Finally someone managed to dissect and examine it.
Maternal impressions from fright or physical violence undoubtedly are followed by the birth of individuals malformed and in many respects with altered minds. Although some biologists try to deny this, the coincidence is too widely observed to admit of doubt, although the precise manner in which the effect is produced has not been clearly demonstrated.
The answer to this question has been furnished by biologists, at which we cannot be surprised. The phenomena of osmosis are naturally of the first importance in the action of organisms, and for a long time have attracted the attention of naturalists.
More than this, when biologists pursue their investigations into the vegetable world, they find that they can, in the same way, follow out the structure of the plant, from the most gigantic and complicated trees down through a similar series of gradations, until they arrive at specks of animated jelly, which they are puzzled to distinguish from those specks which they reached by the animal road.
If this happens very early in the pre-natal life of the child, the results are very likely to be misinterpreted as hereditary. In the last few decades the study of heredity has been so fascinating and fruitful that biologists have given comparatively little attention to early environmental influences. Recent work, however, suggests that such influences are far from negligible.
Appeal to mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, chemists, biologists, about the "Philosophie Positive," and they all, with one consent, begin to make protestation that, whatever M. Comte's other merits, he has shed no light upon the philosophy of their particular studies.
Among biologists who confess themselves supporters of the mechanical theory, there are some who expressly reject explanations in terms of chemical and physical principles, and emphasise, more energetically than others, that these can only give rise to vital phenomena and complex processes of movement, on the basis of a most delicately differentiated structure and architecture of the living substance in its minute details, and from the egg onwards.
The mathematical treatment of the facts is no doubt of very great value, but the violent discussions now going on between mathematicians such as Pearson, Kapteyn and others should warn biologists to abstain from the use of methods which are not necessary for the furtherance of experimental work.
While biologists are still in dispute over many problems connected with heredity, all are agreed to-day that this principle of the continuity of the heredity substance must be the basis of all attempts to understand the machinery of heredity. But plainly this whole process is a function of the cell machinery.
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