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Arguments from social structures, from cosmic, natural and human history, much of it deduced by analogy, were jumbled together in a fashion which seems amazing to us now, though common enough thirty years ago. In 1903, Weismann's theory of the continuity of the germplasm was ten years old.

A man's chief gift to his children is his internal secretion composition. The endocrines are truly the matter of breeding as they are of growth. They are the material carriers of the inherited physical and psychic dispositions, powers, abilities and disabilities from the soma to the germplasm and back from the germplasm to the soma.

And were the air of Mentone not unpropitious to the composition of anything save a kind of literary omelette soufflee, one might like to expatiate on Sergi's remarkable book, and devise thereto an incongruous footnote dealing with the African origin of sundry Greek gods, and another one referring to the extinction of these splendid races of men; how they came to perish so utterly, and what might be said in favour of that novel theory of the influence of an ice-age on the germplasm producing mutations new races which breed true ... enough!

If these brains and hands if human bodies did not wear out or become destroyed, we should not need to trouble ourselves so much about the germplasm, whose sole function in human society is to replace them.

Thus we resemble our parents only because the germplasm which directs our development is a split-off portion of the same continuous line of germ cells which directed their development, that of their fathers, and so on back. This now universally accepted theory is called the "continuity of the germplasm."

It remains to be seen whether we shall thereby, in one generation, be able to affect at all the germplasm, hitherto revered by all pious biologists as an environment-proof holy of holies.

It will be seen at once that this seems to preclude any possibility of a child's inheriting from its parents anything which these did not themselves inherit. The bodies of each generation are, so to speak, mere "buds" from the continuous lines of germplasm.

In other words, the glands of internal secretion, as intermediaries between the environment and body, and between the body and the reproductive sex cells or germplasm, tender the clue to a phase of the puzzle of heredity, adaptation and evolution. It is only a dotted outline of an explanation to be sure, but one certainly capable of being filled in.

Certainly, whether or no we learn how to change the nature of germplasm within a short time, we have in the endocrines the means at hand for affecting the whole individual that is born and sees the light of day. The true physical and intellectual evolution of man depends upon the production of mutations of a desirable kind that can survive.

Continuity of germplasm; The sex chromosome; The internal secretions and the sex complex; The male and the female type of body; How removal of sex glands affects body type; Sex determination; Share of egg and sperm in heredity; Nature of sex sexual selection of little importance; The four main types of secretory systems; Sex and sex-instincts of rats modified by surgery; Dual basis for sex; Opposite-sex basis in every individual; The Free-Martin cattle; Partial reversal of sex in man.