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Reduced in size, as becomes a germ-cell, to a mere fraction of the nebular body from which it sprang, it yet retains within its seemingly non-vital body all the potentialities of the original organism, and requires only to blend with a fellow-cell to bring a new generation into being.
This opposition is most concretely and comprehensively expressed in Haacke’s “Gestaltung und Vererbung.” The infinitely complex intricacy of Weismann’s minute microcosm within the germ-cell, indeed within every id in it, is justly described as a mere duplication, a repetition in the infinitely little of the essential difficulties to be explained.
In the functional processes alluded to in the preceding chapter, the male germ-cell and the female germ-cell unite in a practically equal division of substance. We say "practically" because the maternal and the paternal influences are not equally divided in the offspring. One or the other usually predominates.
On the other hand, the egg-substance of the female germ-cell, which is assimilated by the chromosomes, and which is turned into their substance by the process of organic chemistry, loses its specific plastic vital energy completely. It is in the same way that food eaten by the adult has absolutely no effect on his qualitative organic structure.
We might almost say that just as some race of animals, which multiplies and spreads into divers regions of the earth, becomes differentiated into several races through the adaptation of each to its conditions of life; so, the originally homogeneous population of cells arising in a fertilized germ-cell, becomes divided into several populations of cells that grow unlike in virtue of the unlikeness of their circumstances.
If true, this view would lead to the acceptance of Lamarck's or even Buffon's doctrine, for changes induced in any organ by other than congenital factors could be impressed upon the germ-cell, and would then be transported together with the original specific characters to future generations. Darwin was indeed a good Lamarckian.
If modern science can explain what that common stock is and why and how these germs retain those peculiarities and tendencies, then the answer will be complete and not until then. The Vedanta philosophy, however, has already explained the cause of the potentiality in the germ of life or "germ-plasm" or germ-cell.
In order to explain the mystery of heredity, Weismann long ago elaborated, in his germ-plasm theory, the doctrine that the developing individual is materially preformed, or rather predetermined in the “idants” and “ids” of the germ-cell.
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