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Updated: June 12, 2025
The earliest unicellular organisms can only have been evolved from the simplest organisms we know, the Monera. These are the simplest living things that we can conceive. Their whole body is nothing but a particle of plasm, a granule of living albuminous matter, discharging of itself all the essential vital functions that form the material basis of life.
Meantime, it is probably true that the female, as mother of the race, is more important biologically than the male, since she both furnishes germ plasm and nourishes the newly conceived life. The latest studies, along lines laid down by Mendel, seem to indicate that the female brings to the new creation both male and female attributes, while the male brings only male qualities.
Mendel's principles also account in the most remarkable way for many previously obscure phenomena, like reversion, or a case where a child resembles its grandparent more than it does either of its parents; such phenomena are due, so to speak, to the rise to the surface of a hidden stream of germ plasm that had flowed for one or many generations beneath its accompanying currents.
It came inboard, and was suspended over the deck, a bulging mass, its bottom was unfastened, and out gushed our catch, slithering over the deck, convulsive in the scuppers. The mass of blubber and plasm pulsed with an elfish glow. We were homeward bound. The flat sea was dazzling with reflected sunshine, and a shade had to be erected over the binnacle for the man at the wheel.
In each individual, the cells of the germ plasm continue the life of the parents, of which, in the fullest sense of the word, they are living portions. They are undying. They pass, changeless, to our children and to our children's children. Thus there really persists throughout the whole genealogical tree a part of the same living substance.
"Under the microscope, the germ of, say, tetanus is a minute bar with spore at the end like the head of a tadpole. Of what is this cell composed?" "Probably of a jelly-like substance with excessively minute filaments, but we don't know. We are at the limit of the microscope. We trace certain processes, we even dissect certain cells, but elemental composition of plasm remains a mystery."
In other words, we have here a simple understanding of at least some of the features of heredity. This explanation is that some of the chromatin material or germ plasm is handed down from one generation to another, and is stored temporarily in the nucleii of the reproductive cells.
But if we are correct in regarding this germ material in the reproductive bodies as the basis of heredity and the guiding force in development, then it follows that the only way in which congenital variations can occur is by some variations in the germ plasm.
It must be clear, I am sure, that this theory supplements natural selection, for it describes the physical basis of inheritance, it demonstrates the efficiency of congenital or germ-plasmal factors of variation in contrast with the Lamarckian factors, and finally in the way that in the view of Weismann it accounts for the origin of variations as the result of the commingling of two differing parental streams of germ plasm.
The second method by which the variations of germ plasm may arise is apparently of more importance. It is based upon the fact that, with all higher animals and plants at least, each individual has two parents instead of one.
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