Another notable line of advance, entirely belonging to the period under
review, and chiefly the product of the present century, is seen in the
science of Cytology--the investigation of the microscopic structure of
the cells of which the body is composed. The marvellous phenomena of
cell and nuclear division have revealed much of the formerly unsuspected
complexity of living things, while the universality of the processes
shows how fundamentally alike is life in all its forms. In recent years
great progress has been made in correlating the phenomena of heredity
and of the determination of sex with the visible structural features of
the germ-cells. Weismann attempted a beginning of this over thirty years
ago, but the detailed knowledge of the facts was then insufficient.
Since the discovery of Mendel's Law, a great amount of work has been
done, chiefly in America, by E.B. Wilson and T.H. Morgan and their
pupils, on tracing the actual physical basis of hereditary transmission.
Although the matter is far from being completely known, the results
obtained make it almost indubitable that inherited characters are in
some way borne by the _chromosomes_ in the nuclei of the germ-cells.
The work of Morgan and his school has shown that the actual order in
which these inherited 'factors' are arranged in the chromosomes can
almost certainly be demonstrated, and his results go far to support the
conception of the organism, referred to above, as a combination or
mosaic of independently inherited features.
It was said at the beginning of this sketch that most of the more
notable lines of advance in Biology could be traced back to the impetus
given by the acceptance of the theory of Evolution, and the desire to
test and prove that theory in every biological field. It is most
convenient, therefore, to take this root-idea as a starting-point, and
to see how the various branches of study have diverged from it and have
themselves branched out in various ways, and how these branches have
often again become intertwined and united in the later development of
the science.
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