Dorfmeister thought that he might conclude from his experiments that
temperature exerts the greatest influence in the first place during
the act of pupation, and in the next place immediately after that
period. His experiments were made, however, with such a small number
of specimens that scarcely any safe conclusion can be founded on them;
still, this conclusion may be correct, in so far as everything depends
on whether, from the beginning, the formative processes in the pupa
tended to this or that direction, the final result of which is the
_Prorsa_ or _Levana_ form. If once there is a tendency to one or the
other direction, then temperature might exert an accelerating or a
retarding influence, but the tendency cannot be further changed.
It is also possible--indeed, probable--that a period may be fixed in
which warmth or cold might be able to divert the original direction of
development most easily; and this is the next problem to be attacked,
the answer to which, now that the main points have been determined,
should not be very difficult. I have often contemplated taking the
experiments in hand myself, but have abandoned them, because my
materials did not appear to me sufficiently extensive, and in all such
experiments nothing is to be more avoided than a frittering away of
experimental materials by a too complicated form of problem.
There may indeed be a period most favourable for the action of
temperature during the first days of the pupal stage; it appears from
Experiment No. 12 that individuals tend in different degrees to
respond to such influences, and that the disposition to abandon the
ordinary course of development is different in different individuals.
In no other way can it be explained that, in all the experiments made
with the first and second generations of _Prorsa_, only _a portion_ of
the pupæ were compelled by cold to take the direction of development
of _Levana_, and that even from the former only a few individuals
completely reverted, the majority remaining intermediate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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