126 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
name
“trophoblast,” but also invented the thing, to which it is applied in
embryology. These things are not true. The name was invented for a thing
defined by Hubrecht in 1889, and the thing itself has existed for untold
millions of years!
In
1895 the standpoint had been attained that in every life-cycle of a higher
animal, such as man, there were two generations: an asexual one—the
trophoblast, and a sexual one—the metazoan individual or person. The puzzle was
not how the first of these arose, for clearly !t could be demonstrated any day
in the week that it was the direct product of the cleaved or segmented egg (vide
Fig. 5, phorozoon or larva). Somehow or other there arose gradually upon it
the sexual generation by a process of evolution or unfolding.
How?
Something resembling the spore mother cells of plants was required. That was
very apparent. (See the table of Revised Comparison.) It was not until towards
the close of 1900, when the first harvest of the germ-cell researches had been
reaped, that the problem was cleared up. The germ-cells arose before the
embryo, as products of a single cell, the primitive germ-cell (U.K.Z. of the
diagram, Fig. 5), in a direct line from the fertilized egg. They came into
being upon the asexual generation or trophoblast. To contain and to nourish
these germ-cells for a brief span of time another organism was needed, a sexual
one, endowed with sexual organs.
How
was the sexual organism obtained? In embryology things do not come into existence
out of nothing! True, there are embryologists who look upon holes or cavities
as the sources of important organs, but the writer at all events is not a
“hole-morphologist “
* Any more than the
author of this expression, the late Professor N. Kleinenberg, was.