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.
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