Indeed, it constantly happens that the student of biology, while gazing through his microscope, hits upon discoveries that have the most far-removed implications. Thus a few years ago it was discovered that when a cell is about to bisect itself and become two cells, its nucleus undergoes a curious transformation. Within the nuclear substance little bodies are developed, usually threadlike in form, which take on a deep stain, and which the biologist calls chromosomes. These chromosomes vary in number in the cells of different animals, but the number is always the same for any given species of animal. If one were to group animate beings in classes according to this very fundamental quality of the cells he would have some very curious relations established. Thus, under the heading "creatures whose cells have twenty-four chromosomes," one would find beings so different as "the mouse, the salamander, the trout, and the lily," while the sixteen-chromosome group would introduce the very startling association of the ox, the guinea-pig, the onion, and man himself. But whatever their number, the chromosomes are always exactly bisected before the cell divides, one-half being apportioned to each of the two cells resulting from the division.
Now the application is this: It was the study of these odd nuclear structures and their peculiar manouvrings that, in large measure, led Professor Weismann to his well-known theory of heredity, according to which the acquired traits of any being are not transmissible to the offspring. Professor Weismann came to believe that the apportionment of the nuclear substance, though quantitatively impartial, is sometimes radically uneven in quality; in particular, that the first bisection of the egg-cell, which marks the beginning of embryonic development, produces two cells utterly different in potentiality, the one containing the "body plasm," which is to develop the main animal structures, the other encompassing the "germ plasm," by which the racial integrity is [to be preserved. Throughout the life of the individual, he believed, this isolation continued; hence the assumed lack of influence of acquired bodily traits upon the germ plasm and its engendered offspring. Hence, also, the application of the microscopical discovery to the deepest questions of human social evolution.