The Peckham experiment : a study in the living structure of society / by Innes H. Pearse and Lucy H. Crocker.

Date:
1985
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: The Peckham experiment : a study in the living structure of society / by Innes H. Pearse and Lucy H. Crocker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and finish the job—of producing a unique individuality !” It takes to the work like a duck to water, lacking no essential wisdom from the earliest moment. At this point a question arises that has not to our knowledge been either asked or answered. Can it be that the most important factor about the provision in the knapsack is not so much the quantity of the food so cunningly provided for the traveller as the quality it represents ? It is clear that this knapsack of provender is something of which the inexperienced ovum already has knowledge, something to which it has already been attuned or ‘sensitised’ in the maternal body. When the egg with its yolk prepared in the ovary, leaves the ovarian follicle and, acquiring white and shell in passage from the oviduct, reaches the nest, there is ready for the traveller a carry-over of specific nutriment from one environment to the next. And this is no isolated instance, but represents a principle at work throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Even in the plant world we find a similar knapsack of food within the seed provided for the developing germ when it reaches the soil and begins to germi¬ nate. It is as though the developing embryo takes with it and has at hand at each new stage a sampler of the work it effected in the previous one—a specimen of the digest of its last experience —to serve as a pattern or indication of the new processes to be evolved. So it goes forth on its journey of development, not wholly without guidance as is usually supposed, but informed by knowledge derived from its nurture. We must now go back for a moment to the maternal ovary from which the ovum came. As a result of the departure of the ovum from the follicle a new ovarian secretion—‘progesterone’ —has begun to pour out from the vacated bed of the ruptured ovarian follicle. This floods the mother’s blood, inducing fulfil¬ ment of her next cycle, and at the same time preparing a soft and succulent fining in the womb for the reception of the ovum as it arrives there from the Fallopian tube. So, stage by stage, mother and ovum work in complete mutuality. But what now ? Is all this careful preparation of the ovum for nidation and of the uterine membrane for the reception of the ovum to go forwards, or to go backwards ? That hangs in the