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Updated: May 8, 2025
This is not supposed by him to be due to any inheritance of ancestral gemmules, but to direct growth and transformation of the most minute and the simplest organisms, which themselves, by all reason and analogy, owe their existence to immediate transformation from the inorganic world.
To speak according to pangenesis, the gemmules of hybrids are not injured, for hybrids propagate freely by buds; but their reproductive organs are somehow affected, so that they cannot accumulate the proper gemmules, in nearly the same manner as the reproductive organs of a pure species become affected when exposed to unnatural conditions. This is a very ill-expressed and ill-written letter.
The very simplest forms, in common with the spores and gemmules of the higher ones, are as nearly as may be of the same specific gravity as the water in which they float; and though it cannot be said that among aquatic creatures superior specific gravity is a standard of general superiority, yet we may fairly say that the superior orders of them, when divested of the appliances by which their specific gravity is regulated, differ more from water in their relative weights than do the lower.
We would point out innumerable gemmules of gelatinous matter, which at certain seasons of the year may be seen spouting "from all parts of the living film which invests the horny skeleton;" until, at length, escaping from the nursery in which they grew, they are carried off to the wide sea by means of the force of the currents issuing from the sponge, though not left to perish at the mercy of the waves.
Such self-multiplying gemmules without pangenesis would enable us to understand both the excessive weakness or non-existence of normal use-inheritance, and the excessive strength and abruptness of the effect of their partial destruction under special pathological conditions.
Pangenesis, with its attraction of gemmules from all parts of the body into the germ-cells, and the free circulation of gemmules in the offspring till they hit upon or are attracted by the particular cell or cells, with which alone they can readily unite, seems a less feasible theory and less in conformity with the whole of the facts than an hypothesis of germ-continuity which supposes that the development of the germ-plasm and of the successive self-dividing cells of the body proceeds from within.
All organic beings, moreover, include many dormant gemmules derived from their grandparents and more remote progenitors, but not from all their progenitors. These almost infinitely numerous and minute gemmules must be included in each bud, ovule, spermatozoon, and pollen grain."
If, then, food be considered as a direct agent in causing the structures and instinct, and not an indirect agent, merely indicating to the larva itself that it is to make itself after the fashion of neuter bees, then we should bear in mind that, at any rate, it has been leavened and prepared in the stomachs of those neuter bees into which the larva is now expected to develop itself, and may thus have in it more true germinative matter gemmules, in fact than is commonly supposed.
The existence of the gemmules is a first unknown element; the propagative affinity of the gemmules is a second; their germinative affinity is a third; their multiplication by fission is a fourth and what an unknown element!"
Minute “gemmæ,” homogeneous fundamental particles of living substance, not to be compared to or confused with Darwin’s “gemmules,” are aggregated in “Gemmaria,” whose configuration, stability, symmetrical or asymmetrical structure, and so on, are determined by the relative positions of the gemmæ to each other, and these in their turn control the organism and give it a corresponding symmetrical or asymmetrical, a firmly or loosely aggregated structure.
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