Publisher's Synopsis
From the TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
Every student of heredity is brought face to face with the problem of some mechanism of inheritance. Pangenesis was Darwin's solution of this problem. But it was not in the form in which Darwin left it that pangenesis became directly fruitful of results; and no one felt the insufficiency of his hypothesis more keenly than Darwin himself. Writing to Asa Gray in 1867 he said: "The chapter on what I call Pangenesis will be called a mad dream but at the bottom of my own mind I think it contains a great truth." And to J. D. Hooker, in 1868, he wrote: "I feel sure if Pangenesis is now still born it will, thank God, at some future time reappear, begotten by some other father, and christened by some other name." Many men discerned the weak features of the hypothesis, but to Hugo de Vries belongs the credit of having detected the "great truth" it contained. He became its "other father," and rechristened it with another name -a name more nearly like the original, no doubt, than Darwin could have imagined. The pangenesis of Darwin was hardly susceptible of experimental verification, except to the extent that a more intimate acquaintance with the facts showed that the assumption of a transportation of "gemmules" was superfluous. But it contained the germ of de Vries's intracellular pangenesis, the direct progenitor of the mutation theory. It was primarily because of this genetic relationship, together with the masterful way in which the hypothesis is developed, and the accompanying wealth of illustration, that the little German volume, here done into English, was deemed worthy of translation at the present time....
