As to the contrast here drawn between inheritance and other similifying factors, it is hardly necessary to remark that we are speaking of inheritance as defined in terms of Mendelian experiment and cytological observation. In the so-called chemical theory of inheritance, the distinction would be meaningless and the contrast would not exist. Ehrlich’s disciple, Adami, sets aside all self-propagating germinal determinants, like the chromomeres, in favor of a hypothetical “biophoric molecule,” which is to be conceived as a benzine-like ring bristling with sidechains. Around this determining core the future organism is built up in definite specificity, as an arch is constructed about a template. Adami has merely applied Paul Ehrlich’s ideas concerning metabolism and immunity to the question of heredity, commandeering for this purpose the latter’s entire toolkit of receptors, haptophores, amboceptors, etc., as though this grotesque paraphernalia of crude and clumsy mechanical symbols (which look for all the world like the wrenches of a machinist, or the lifters used by the cook to remove hot lids from the kitchen range) could throw any valuable light whatsoever on the exceedingly complex, and manifestly vital, phenomenon of inheritance. It does not even deserve to be called a chemical theory, for, as Starling correctly remarks concerning Ehrlich’s conception, “though chemical in form,” it is not so in reality, because “it does not explain the phenomenon by reference to the known laws of chemistry.” (Cf. _Physiology_, ed. of 1920, p. 1084.) In a word, the theory of heredity, which seeks to strip inheritance of its uniqueness as a vital process by identifying it with the more general physicochemical processes occurring in the organism, is a groundless speculation, that, far from explaining, flouts the very observational data which it pretends to elucidate. _Kurz und gut!_ to requite the mechanist, Schäfer, with his own Danielesque phrase, here, as elsewhere, the mechanists have succeeded in extracting from the facts, not what the facts themselves proclaim, but what preëxisted in their own highly-cultured imaginations so well-stocked with cogs, cranks, ball bearings, and other æsthetic imagery emanating from polytechnic schools and factories.