THE PROBLEMS OF CANCER 97
and,
like the recapitulation theory, merely illusions of the human imagination. An
antithetic alternation is seen to be an iron necessity of the development as
soon as it is perceived that an organism, an asexual one, must develop upon
which germ-cells can arise; while the sexual generation, “the embryo” of
embryologists, is called forth from one of these germ-cells to contain and to
nourish the rest for a certain brief span of time. Moreover, the facts of
development, which to some extent have been unearthed during the past fifteen
years within this city, throw a flood of new light upon the crude materialism
of modern embryological textbooks. The biophores of Weismann and the pangens of
De Vries become shadowy entities of the real existences of which there are no
evidences. And while with humility admitting that to say it is to furnish no
explanation of the riddle of life, it must be recognized that the characters or
qualities of animals or plants are certainly not present in the germ in the
shape of ultra-microscopic particles of chromatin, the pangens or biophores,
but that all the wonderful and infinite variety of animate nature has its fount
in unconscious memories of germ-cells.*
Modern
embryology, not to be confused with that extant in textbooks, claims as its own
two vastly important regions of human knowledge. These are the facts and
nature of heredity and genetic variation and
* For a fuller account of the theory of heredity
based in the unconscious memories of germ-cells, set up by Professor Ewald
Hering, now Director of the Physiological Institute in the University of
Leipzic, in 1870, see Beard, J.: “Philosophical Biology,” in Ainsworth
Davis’s “Science of To-Day,” vol. ii., 1909, pp. 37-64, with list of
literature, which should also include Samuel Butler’s “Unconscious Memory,”
first edition, 1880, revised edition, 1910 (Fifield, London), and the
presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science,
1908, by Professor Francis Darwin.