ity contradicted the theory almost
at every point. Heredity, instead of being resemblance, was an effort
toward resemblance thwarted by circumstances and environment. And he had
arrived at what he called the hypothesis of the abortion of cells. Life
is only motion, and heredity being a communicated motion, it happened
that the cells in their multiplication from one another jostled one
another, pressed one another, made room for themselves, putting forth,
each one, the hereditary effort; so that if during this struggle the
weaker cells succumbed, considerable disturbances took place, with
the final result of organs totally different. Did not variation, the
constant invention of nature, which clashed with his theories, come from
this? Did not he himself differ from his parents only in consequence of
similar accidents, or even as the effect of larvated heredity, in which
he had for a time believed? For every genealogical tree has roots which
extend as far back into humanity as the first man; one cannot proceed
from a single ancestor; one may always resemble a still older, unknown
ancestor. He doubted atavism, however; it seemed to him, in spite of a
remarkable example taken from his own family, that resemblance at the
end of two or three generations must disappear by reason of accidents,
of interferences, of a thousand possible combinations. There was then
a perpetual becoming, a constant transformation in this communicated
effort, this transmitted power, this shock which breathes into matter
the breath of life, and which is life itself. And a multiplicity
of questions presented themselves to him. Was there a physical and
intellectual progress through the ages? Did the brain grow with the
growth of the sciences with which it occupied itself? Might one hope,
in time, for a larger sum of reason and of happiness? Then there were
special problems; one among others, the mystery of which had for a long
time irritated him, that of sex; would science never be able to predict,
or at least to explain the sex of the embryo being? He had written a
very curious paper crammed full of facts on this subject, but which left
it in the end in the complete ignorance in which the most exhaustive
researches had left it. Doubtless the question of heredity fascinated
him as it did only because it remained obscure, vast, and unfathomable,
like all the infant sciences where imagination holds sway. Finally, a
long study which he had made on the heredi