te or vibrate, gradually
becoming weaker in the whole organism (not only in the nervous system,
for they also act on plants). By this means, engraphia, although
infinitely enfeebled, may finally reach the germinal cells. _Semon_
then shows how the most feeble engraphias may gradually arrive at
ecphoria, as the result of numerous repetitions (in phylogeny after
innumerable generations). This is how the mnemic principle allows us
to conceive the possibility of an infinitely slow heredity of
characters acquired by individuals, a heredity resulting from
prolonged repetition.

The facts invoked by _Weismann_ against the heredity of acquired
characters lose nothing of their weight by this, for the influence of
crossing (conjugation) and selection transforms the material organic
forms in an infinitely more rapid and intense manner than individual
mnemic engraphias. The latter, on the other hand, furnish the
explanation of the mutations of _de Vries_, which appear to be only
sudden ecphoria of accumulated long engraphic actions.

The way in which _Semon_ studies and discusses the laws of the mneme
in morphology, physiology and psychology, is truly magisterial, and
the perspective which opens out from these new ideas is extensive. The
mneme, with the aid of the energetic action of the external world,
acts on organisms by preserving them and combining them by engraphia,
while selection eliminates all that is ill-adapted, and homophony
reestablishes the equilibrium. The irritations of the external world,
therefore, furnish the material for the construction of organisms. I
confess to having been converted by _Semon_ to this way of conceiving
the heredity of acquired characters. Instead of several nebulous
hypotheses, we have only one--the nature of mnemic engraphia. It is
for the future to discover its origin in physical and chemical laws.

I must refer my readers to _Semon's_ book, for this volume of 343
pages, filled with facts and proofs, cannot be condensed into a few
paragraphs.

=Each Cell bears in itself Ancestral Energy.= As we have already seen,
the germinal, cells are not the only ones which possess the energies
of all the characters of the species. On the contrary it becomes more
and more certain, from further investigation, that each cell of the
body bears in itself, so to speak, all the energies of the species, as
is distinctly seen in plants. But in all the cells which are not
capable of germinating, these ener