cal basis of heredity
which still retains its original powers. This undifferentiated chromatin
material originally possessed powers of producing a new individual, and
of course it still possesses these powers, since it has remained dormant
without alteration. Further, it will follow that if this dormant
undifferentiated chromatin should start into activity and produce a new
individual, the new individual thus produced would be identical in all
characters with the one which actually did develop from the egg, since
both individuals would have come from a bit of the same chromatin. The
child would be like the parent. This would be true no matter how much
this undifferentiated material should increase in amount by
assimilation, _so long as it remained unaltered in character_, and it
hence follows that every individual carries around a certain amount of
undifferentiated chromatin material in all respects identical with that
from which he developed.

Now whether this undifferentiated _germ plasm_, as we will now call it,
is distributed all over the body, or is collected at certain points, is
immaterial to our purpose. It is certain that portions of it find their
way into the reproductive organs of the animal or plant. Thus we see
that part of the chromatin material in the egg of the first generation
develops into the second generation, while another part of it remains
dormant in that second generation, eventually becoming the chromatin of
its eggs and spermatozoa. Thus each egg of the second generation
receives chromosomes which have come directly from the first generation,
and thus it will follow that each of these eggs will have identical
properties with the egg of the first generation. Hence if one of these
new eggs develops into an adult it will produce an adult exactly like
the second generation, since it contains chromosomes which are
absolutely identical with those from which the second generation sprung.
There is thus no difficulty in understanding why the second generation
will be like the first, and since the process is simply repeated again
in the next reproduction, the third generation will be like the second,
and so on, generation after generation. A study of the accompanying
diagram will make this clear.

In other words, we have here a simple understanding of at least some of
the features of heredity. This explanation is that some of the chromatin
material or germ plasm is handed down from one generation to ano