Now the parts referred to are a series of minute rod-like structures called _chromatin rods_ that are very active and manifest all kinds of changes according to necessity, especially at that critical period in the history of a cell called cell-division, when it is about to propagate its species by _making itself_ into two by equal distributions of its substance between its two selves. For you must know that when a cell divides (and this does not refer to human cells alone, but all vegetable and animal cells from the simplest to the most complex) the products are two so-called “daughter cells,” but they are daughters without a mother. It is one of the most mystical processes in existence and contains much secret knowledge for it contains the mystery of the birth of two from one. In this process, called in scientific parlance _Karyokinesis_, these little rods play a most important part, nay, the _all-important_ part, for the whole process commences with them and proceeds from the centre outward. There is at the commencement of the process a disturbance, a series of vibrations throughout the nucleus. These little rods immediately form into a kind of reticulum or network; then this network arranges itself into an indefinite spiral, at which instant two mysterious bodies issue from the mass at opposite poles, and take up a position in the cell, at some distance from the coil of rods; then the spiral breaks up into two opposing sets of loops.
Ultimately these two sets of rods settle down in the neighborhood of the two little bodies (_centrosomes_) shot out, or, I should perhaps say, are attracted separately to the two poles of the cell by the _centrosomes_. Then a cell wall forms between; the one cell becomes two.
There are some very occult forces at work behind all this, and they generally are referred to, to cover our ignorance, as the law of polarity, albeit that this law, whatever it is, involves the most occult of the creative forces, in fact of all manifestation.
To go back, Dr. Weissmann does not consider these rods which he calls _idants_ as the essential units, but states that in their turn these are themselves composed of more minute bodies he calls _ids_.
In this respect, however, he considers protoplasm as a whole as composed, not of so many chemical compounds, having an indefinite and uncontrollable action on one another, but of collections of “molecules united into a single group.” These molecules he calls _biophors_. The biophors, as bearers of vitality, possess the power of growth and of multiplication by fission. But the biophors which go to make up the rods, have a more specific character of their own, and are the carriers of those minuter bodies still which this savant speaks of as the real creative units, or what he calls “_determinants_.” These ultimate determinants, smaller than microscopic, hold within their tiny hearts the ideal shape of the part which they are destined to control, carried and distributed in the process of evolution of the creature by the process of cell division.