ABSTRACT
The origin and development of the egg-cell in the mother’s body, the transmission of the bodily and mental peculiarities of the father to it by his seed, touch upon all the questions which the human mind has ever raised about man’s existence.” Both the law of homochronous and homotopic transmission are fundamental laws of embryology, or ontogeny. The law of interrupted or latent transmission by inheritance, which might also be termed alternating transmission, is in a measure opposed to the preceding law. The most important task in the physiology of Inheritance would therefore be to obtain a deeper insight into the processes of these molecular movements, and to examine more accurately the physio-chemical processes connected with them, and to do this experimentally wherever possible. Extraordinary importance has of late been ascribed to amphigonous inheritance by Weismann; he considers it, in the case of all many-celled organisms, as the universal cause of their individual variability.
