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Updated: May 22, 2025
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.
Then the different divisions, brigades, and regiments, composing each next higher unit, separate, being detailed to form ever smaller portions of the body. The process of changing germ-plasm into somatoplasm is one of disintegration. The germ-plasm contains representatives of the whole army; a somatic cell only representatives of one special arm of a special training.
Florence Nightingale, too, might have been a softer and more human person. But then would she have revolutionized the practice of nursing? Oscar Wilde possibly might have been made over into a heterosexual. But then would not the world be the poorer without "De Profundis," let us ask? How much are we to stand of that which degrades the germ-plasm while it raises the mind-plasm of the race?
The molecules of germ-plasm are grouped in units, and these in an ascending series of units of continually increasing complexity, until at last we find the highest unit represented in the nucleus of the germ-cell. This grouping of molecules in units of increasing complexity is like the grouping of the men of an army in companies, regiments, brigades, divisions, etc.
The germ-cells are thus the bearers of heredity because they contain samples, so to speak, of all the organs of the body. In heredity, according to Weismann's theory, the egg is the centre of control, the continuous germ-plasm the source of all transmitted changes; according to Darwin's theory, the body is the source, and the egg is derived in great part at least from it.
On another page he writes: "I believe that heredity depends upon the fact that a small portion of the effective substance of the germ, the germ-plasm, remains unchanged during the development of the ovum into an organism, and that this part of the germ-plasm serves as a foundation from which the germ-cells of the new organism are produced.
The difference between Professor Weismann and, we will say, Heringians consists in the fact that the first maintains the new germ-plasm when on the point of repeating its developmental processes to take practically no cognisance of anything that has happened to it since the last occasion on which it developed itself; while the latter maintain that offspring takes much the same kind of account of what has happened to it in the persons of its parents since the last occasion on which it developed itself, as people in ordinary life take things that happen to them.
"I am also far from asserting that the germ-plasm which, as I hold, is transmitted as the basis of heredity from one generation to another, is absolutely unchangeable or totally uninfluenced by forces residing in the organism within which it is transformed into germ-cells.
Weismann's explanation of this change of germ-plasm into somatoplasm is very ingenious, and depends upon his theory of the structure of the germ-plasm; and this latter theory forms the basis of his theory of evolution. It would take too long to state his theory of the structure of germ-plasm, but an illustration may present fairly clear all that is of special importance to us.
Still more slow may be the moulding of the still more refractory germ-plasm, if such there be. But the moulding process goes on parallel in the two cases. But Weismann's argument rests not merely upon any difficulty or impossibility of the transmissibility of acquired characteristics.
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