Heredity : with preludes on current events / by Joseph Cook.

  • Josephus Flavius Cook
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Heredity : with preludes on current events / by Joseph Cook. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    на HEREDITY. him with his fingers more than with his eyes, and heard him with his elbows rather than with his ears, will defend on the street, and sometimes in the news¬ papers, that obsolescent form of materialism which even Spencer discards. I shall, from this point on, take it for granted that the Lucretian hypothesis of materialism is dead. Next we come to Darwin's theory of the elective affinities, or pangenesis. We have^ here a circle, let us suppose, and at its centre there is an atom of matter. According to Darwin's hypothesis, all the movements of matter in living organisms are to be accounted for by the elective affinities of minute particles called gemmules. Därwin does not in terms deny that the first germs were originated by the Divine Power, and it is not necessary for him to do that. Such affinities were put into that original germ, that everything we call life has been developed out of the germ. We, therefore, must determine the qualities of that original living matter by Darwin's definition of elective affini¬ ties. Now, how many affinities must there be to account for the movements of a particle of matter to any and every point of a circle drawn around it ? Why, just as many affinities as there are points in a circle ! You have three hundred and sixty degrees in your circle, and there may be at least three hundred and sixty points measurable bythe microscope in each degree. If the affinities of this gemmule account for all its movements, they must account for its movements in any direction, toward any part of that circle. In constructing the complex whole we call тащ the gem- mules must move to every part of a circle, up, down, forward, backward. Indeed,, we must not only have affinities that will enable the atom to move in every direction inside a circle, but in every direction inside a sphere. I have represented here only a plane sur¬ face ; but, if there were another circle cutting thus at right angles [drawing a figure on the blackboard], the atom would need to have as many affinities as are
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