Sec. 16. Germ-Cell, Stem-Cell or Fertilized Ovum
The fertilized ovum is variously called, “germ-cell,” “stem-cell,” “first segmentation sphere,” “parent-cell,” “impregnated ovum,” “fertilized egg cell,” and other names of like import, all these phrases meaning the same thing.
Under the head, “Conception,” Haeckel says, among other things:
“The process of fertilization by sexual conception consists, therefore, essentially, in the coälescence and fusing together of two different cells. The lively spermatozoön travels toward the ovum by its serpentine movements and bores its way into the female cell. The nuclei of both sexual cells attracted by a certain affinity approach each other and melt into one.”—(Haeckel, Ev. Man, p. 53.)
How do they acquire this “affinity?” How do they know each other? Have they intellect, memory and will? Are they not driven toward each other by a supernatural, psychic force?
Continuing he says:
“The fertilized cell is quite another thing from the unfertilized cell. For if we must regard the spermia [spermatozoä] as real cells, no less than the ova, and the process of conception as the coälescence of the two we must consider the resultant cell as a quite new and independent organism. It bears in the cell and nuclear matter of the penetrating spermatozoön a part of the father’s body, and in the protoplasm of the ovum a part of the mother’s body. This is clear from the fact that the child inherits many features from both parents. It inherits from the father by means of the spermatozoön and from the mother by means of the ovum. The actual blending of the two cells produces a third cell, which is the germ of the child, or new organism conceived. One may also say of this sexual coälescence that the stem cell is a simple hermaphrodite, it unites both sexual substances in itself.” (Ev. Man, pp. 53-54.)
“The individual development,” he says, “in man and the other animals, commences with the formation of a simple ‘stem-cell,’ of this character, and this then passes by repeated segmentation (or cleavage) into a cluster of cells, known as ‘the segmentation sphere,’ or ‘segmentation cell.’” (Haeckel, Ev. Man, p. 54.)
On another page (56) he says:
“Hence the essential point in the process of sexual reproduction or impregnation is the formation of a new cell, the stem-cell, by the combination of two originally different cells, the female ovum and the male spermatozoön. The process is of the highest importance and merits our closest attention. All that happens in the later development of this first cell, and in the life of the organism that comes of it, is determined from the first by the chemical and morphological composition of the stem-cell, its nucleus and its body.” (Ev. Man, p. 56.)