When we say that the germ within the hen’s egg remembers having made
itself into a chicken on past occasions, or that each one of 100,000
salmon germs remembers to have made itself into a salmon (male or female)
in the persons of the single pair of salmon its parents, do we intend
that each single one of these germs was a witness of, and a concurring
agent in, the development of the parent forms from their respective
germs, and that each one of them therefore, was shut up within the parent
germ, like a small box inside a big one?
If so, then the parent germ with its millions of brothers and sisters was
in like manner enclosed within a grand-parental germ, and so on till we
are driven to admit, after even a very few generations, that each
ancestor has contained more germs than could be expressed by a number
written in small numerals, beginning at St. Paul’s and ending at Charing
Cross. Mr. Darwin’s provisional theory of pangenesis comes to something
very like this, so far as it can be understood at all.
Therefore it will save trouble (and we should observe no other
consideration) to say that the germs that unite to form any given
sexually produced individual were not present in the germs, or with the
germs, from which the parents sprang, but that they came into the
parents’ bodies at some later period.
We may perhaps find it convenient to account for their intimate
acquaintance with the past history of the body into which they have been
introduced by supposing that in virtue of assimilation they have acquired
certain periodical rhythms already pre-existing in the parental bodies,
and that the communication of the characteristics of these rhythms
determines at once the physical and psychical development of the
individual in a course as nearly like that of the parents as changed
surroundings will allow.
For, according to my _Life and Habit_ theory, everything in connection
with embryonic development is referred to memory, and this involves that
the thing remembering should have been present and an actor in the
development which it is supposed to remember; but we have just settled
that the germs which unite to form any individual, and which when united
proceed to develop according to what I suppose to be their memory of
their previous developments, were not participators in any previous
development and cannot therefore remember it. They cannot remember even
a single development, much less can they remember that infinite series of
developments the recollection and epitomisation of which is a _sine qua
non_ for the unconsciousness which we note in normal development. I see
no way of getting out of this difficulty so convenient as to say that a
memory is the reproduction and recurrence of a rhythm communicated
directly or indirectly from one substance to another, and that where a
certain rhythm exists there is a certain stock of memories, whether the
actual matter in which the rhythm now subsists was present with the
matter in which it arose or not.
There is another little difficulty in the question whether the matter
that I suppose introduced into the parents’ bodies during their
life-histories, and that goes to form the germs that afterwards become
their offspring, is living or non-living. If living, then it has its own
memories and life-histories which must be cancelled and undone before the
assimilation and the becoming imbued with new rhythms can be complete.
That is to say it must become as near non-living as anything can become.
Sooner or later, then, we get this introduced matter to be non-living (as
we may call it) and the puzzle is how to get it living again. For we
strenuously deny equivocal generation. When matter is living we contend
that it can only have been begotten of other like living matter; we deny
that it can have become living from non-living. Here, however, within
the bodies of animals and vegetables we find equivocal generation a
necessity; nor do I see any way out of it except by maintaining that
nothing is ever either quite dead or quite alive, but that a little
leaven of the one is always left in the other. For it would be as
difficult to get the thing dead if it is once all alive, as alive if once
all dead.
According to this view to beget offspring is to communicate to two pieces
of protoplasm (which afterwards combine) certain rhythmic vibrations
which, though too feeble to generate visible action until they receive
accession of fresh similar rhythms from exterior objects, yet on receipt
of such accession set the game of development going and maintain it. It
will be observed that the rhythms supposed to be communicated to any
germs are such as have been already repeatedly refreshed by rhythms from
exterior objects in preceding generations, so that a consonance is
rehearsed and pre-arranged, as it were, between the rhythm in the germ
and those that in the normal course of its ulterior existence are likely
to flow into it. If there is too serious a discord between inner and
outer rhythms the organism dies.