96 THE ENZYME
TREATMENT OF CANCER
The
fundamental problem, the very basis of embryology, is the course of the
life-cycle in the higher animals, including man. This question of the mode of
the development far exceeds in import all other problems of pure embryology.
It touches upon, without at present offering any explanation of, the nature of
life itself. But while the latter is now beyond human grasp, and may elude it
for ever, the solution of the great problem of the life-cycle, seemingly so
complex, albeit so simple, furnishes results of overwhelming import for all the
sciences of life. The history of embryology tells us flow for centuries the
fight, whether epigenesis or preformation, went on; how, on the one side, the
development was regarded as analogous to the building of a house, “part being
added to part,” and how, on the other, men like Haller denied any coming into
being, the embryo being preformed in all its parts. So slow is real progress in
a science like embryology, and so greedily receptive of error is the human
mind, that in our day we hardly dare hope to see the last of the two rival
erroneous doctrines of epigenesis and preformation. Like the chameleon of the
story, “the creature’s neither one nor t’other.” Underlying the phenomena of development
in the higher animals there are an antithetic alternation of asexual and
sexual generations, a morphological continuity of germ-cells from generation to
generation— the Alpha and Omega of development—and an unfolding based in
predestination. At tile basis of all development lie the germ-cells, which,
paraphrasing Robinson’s eloquent words, go back to a beginning so remote as to
be utterly beyond our knowledge, and pass to a future of which we can form no
conception whatever. Under the phenomena presented by the germ-cells in their
cycle direct development and epigenesis can find no places. Looked at in the
light of the facts, they are impossibilities