Abstract
THE reply to Prof. Dendy's comments upon my letter (NATURE, February 8, p. 482) is briefly as follows. The germ-cells are unicellular living organisms with a lifecycle of their own, part of which they pass in a metazoan individual. When they enter it, they are all in potentialities so many twins identical with this. For the time being its environment is theirs. The non-existent protoplasmic bridges need not be postulated. If the germ-cells could not “remember events in the past history of the race”, I fail to perceive how any developmental unfolding would be possible. The relation of the doctrine of acquired characters to the theory depends solely upon the embryological facts of the cycle of animal life.
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BEARD, J. The Mnemic Theory of Heredity. Nature 88, 585–586 (1912). https://doi.org/10.1038/088585b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/088585b0
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