[Page 219] That there should be physiological units possessed of the power attributed to them, harmonizes with what has recently been put forward by Dr.H.
Charlton Bastian; who maintains that under fit conditions the simplest organisms develop themselves into relatively large and complex ones.

This is not supposed by him to be due to any inheritance of ancestral gemmules, but to direct growth and transformation of the most minute and the simplest organisms, which themselves, by all reason and analogy, owe their existence to immediate transformation from the inorganic world.
Thus, then, there are grave difficulties in the way of the reception of the hypothesis of Pangenesis, which moreover, if established, would leave the evolution of individual organisms, when thoroughly analysed, little if at all less mysterious or really explicable than it is at present.
As was said at the beginning of this chapter, "Pangenesis" and "Natural Selection" are quite separable and distinct hypotheses.

The fall of one of these by no means necessarily includes that of the other.

Nevertheless, Mr.
Darwin has associated them closely together, and, therefore, the refutation of Pangenesis may render it advisable for those who have hitherto accepted "Natural Selection" to reconsider that theory.

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