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Is there a quantitative addition of internal glandular tendencies in the germplasm, or a more complex rearrangement dependent upon reactions between all the internal secretions? The term endocrine dominants brings up the inquiries of Mendelism, and the relation of Mendelian conceptions of dominant and recessive to the internal secretions.
Since this nuclear substance exists in the new cells, and since these generations go on indefinitely, the cells are in a sense "immortal" or deathless. In a one-celled individual, there is no distinction between germinal and bodily functions. But the germ-cells or germplasm continue to be immortal or deathless in the same sense as in the simplest organisms.
If we develop our muscles or our musical talent, this development is of the body and dies with it, though the physical basis or capacity we ourselves inherited is still in the germplasm and is therefore passed along to our children. We may also furnish our children an environment which will stimulate their desire and lend opportunity for similar or greater advancement than our own.
Nobody has so far produced evidence of any trace of any biological mechanism whereby development of part of the body say the biceps of the brain of the individual could possibly produce such a specific modification of the germplasm he carries as to result in the inheritance of a similar development by his offspring.
These memories are dim and confused, and many of them are lost. But some strains of germplasm carry an excessive freightage of memories are, to be scientific, more atavistic than other strains; and such a strain is mine. I am a freak of heredity, an atavistic nightmare call me what you will; but here I am, real and alive, eating three hearty meals a day, and what are you going to do about it?
It may be the initial effect; very probably it is; but since the main function of the spermatozoon must be the introduction of germplasm from the male parent, it is too much for anyone to ask us to believe that its main function is concerned with surface alteration.
It is always the product of the germplasm which concerns us, and we are interested in the germ-cells themselves only in relation to their capacity to produce individuals of value to society.
Then you and I and all of us receive these memories from our fathers and mothers, as they received them from their fathers and mothers. Therefore there must be a medium whereby these memories are transmitted from generation to generation. This medium is what Weismann terms the "germplasm." It carries the memories of the whole evolution of the race.
In these higher animals this protoplasm is known as germplasm, that in body cells as somatoplasm. All that is really meant by "immortality" in a germplasm is continuity. That is, while an individual may consist of a colony of millions of cells, all of these spring from one cell and it a germ cell the fertilized ovum.
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