Note 16 — I Lord, What is Man?

“The doctrine preached by Weismann was that to start with the body and inquire how its characters got into the germ was to view the sequence from the wrong end; the proper starting point was the germ, and the real question was not ‘How do the characters of the organism get into the germ-cell which it produces?’ but ‘How are the characters of an organism represented in the germ which produces it?’ Or, as Samuel Butler has it, the proper statement of the relation between successive generations is not to say that a hen produces another hen through the medium of an egg, but to say that a hen is merely an egg’s way of producing another egg.” Breeding and the Mendelian Discovery, by A. D. Darbishire. Cassell & Co., 1911, p. 187–8.