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Updated: June 12, 2025
This germ plasm is evidently identical with that in A, since it is merely a bit of the same handed down through the individual, B. In the development of the next generation the process is repeated, and hence B' will be like B, and the third generation of eggs identical with the first and second.
He also speaks of the sensitiveness of "plasm," or the substance of "living bodies," as being "only a superior degree of the general irritability of substance." Chemical reaction, between atoms, is spoken of by chemists as a "sensitive" reaction. Sensitiveness is found even in the Particles of Inorganic Substance, and may be regarded as the first glimmerings of thought.
The next stage is for the little animal to develop fine irregular threads of flint in its skin, a much better security against the animal-eater. These animalcules, it must be recollected, are bits of almost pure plasm, and, as they live in crowds, dividing and subdividing, but never dying, make excellent mouthfuls for a small feeder.
In regard to the congenital variations there can be no difficulty. The very fact that they are congenital shows us that they have been produced by variations in the germ plasm, and as such they must be transmitted, not only to the next generation, but to all following generations, until the germ plasm becomes again modified.
This stream of germ plasm passes on in direct continuity through successive generations from egg to the complete adult, including its own germ-cells, through these to the next adult, with its germ-cells, and so on and on as long as the species exists.
Certain forms of bacilli are known to Science that have been subjected to degrees of heat and cold that are but terms to any but the scientific mind. Low forms of life called Diatoms or "living crystals" are known. They are tiny geometrical forms. They are composed of a tiny drop of plasm, resembling glue, covered by a thin shell of siliceous or sandy material.
Speech is a means not only of designating things but of the manifest relations between things. It "short-cuts" thought so that we may store up a thousand experiences in one word. And we may truly converse with the dead and be profoundly changed by them. If the germ plasm is the organ of biological heredity, speech and its derivatives are the organs of social heredity!
This difficulty of understanding how the germ plasm can be affected by external conditions has led one school of biologists to deny that it is subject to any variation by external conditions, and hence that all modification of the germ plasm must come from some other source.
The whole life of these homogeneous globules of plasm consists of simple growth and reproduction by cleavage. When the tiny particle has reached a certain size by the continuous assimilation of inorganic matter, it divides into two equal halves, by a constriction in the middle. The two daughter-monera that are thus formed immediately begin a similar vital process.
Now, the two parents are never exactly alike, and hence the germ plasm which each contributes to the offspring will not be exactly alike. The offspring will thus be the result of the unfolding of a bit of germ plasm which will be different from that from which either of its parents developed, and these differences will result in congenital variations.
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