Intracellular Pangenesis

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter II THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHEMICAL MOLECULES OP THE PROTOPLASM WITH REFERENCE TO THE THEORY OF HEREDITY /. Introduction According to our present conception of all nature, the wonderful phenomena of heredity must have a material basis, and this basis can be no other than the living protoplasm....
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter II THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHEMICAL MOLECULES OP THE PROTOPLASM WITH REFERENCE TO THE THEORY OF HEREDITY /. Introduction According to our present conception of all nature, the wonderful phenomena of heredity must have a material basis, and this basis can be no other than the living protoplasm. Every cell originates through the division of one that already exists; the living substance of the mother-cell is distributed among the individual daughter- cells and passes into them with all its hereditary qualities. Microscopic investigation of the cell-body and the art of the breeder, so far apart from each other until recently, come nearer and nearer to working hand in hand. And it is only through the co-operation of these two great lines of human thought that we can succeed in establishing the basis for a theory of heredity. Chemistry teaches us that living protoplasm, like any other substance, must be built up of chemical molecules, and that a final explanation of the phenomena of life can be reached only when we shall succeed in deriving the processes in protoplasm from the grouping of its molecules, and from the composition of the latter out of their - atoms. We are still, however, very far from this goal. The chemists study chiefly pure bodies, that is, such as are built up from like molecules; but protoplasm is evidently a mixture of numerous, if not of almost countless different chemical compounds. And by far the most of theselatter have been, even chemically, only very incompletely investigated. Of course, this consideration must not keep us from utilizing the great truths of chemistry in the explanation of life processes. Haeckel, and many other investigators after him, have pointed out the great significance, for such an explanation, of the po...