Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Are Acquired Characters transmitted? The practical issues which both Galton and Weis- mann have raised cannot, however, be underestimated, and, in respect to the non-inheritance of acquired characters, the mass of modern thinkers may already be said to have given their allegiance to the views of those two thinkers. But we are living in times when mere authority is at a discount, and we may well demand the facts for ourselves. The point which we are inclined to question is one as to which a doubt was often present in Darwin's mind. Granted that selection is a factor, we are inclined to believe that the transmission of acquired characters must also take place, at any rate, to some extent. In attempting to decide this question upon the facts themselves we may take two lines of research. In the first place, we may examine every case of racial change, the production of new or different parts, the development of a new instinct, or the degeneration or loss of parts or instincts present at some past epoch. If in every case we are not compelled to exclude natural selection, and if in every case that we can directly and experimentally follow, selection is the outstanding factor, then there is strong presumptive evidence that racial change is caused by selection and not by the inheritance of acquired characters. In the second place, we mayartificially induce the acquisition of some character, and notice whether this is transmitted ; if it is not, then the general operation of this kind of transmission is rendered very doubtful. Many Cases of Supposed Transmission to be explained by Selection. It is upon these two lines that Galton and Weismann worked, and we may now follow in rough outline the evidence they adduced., Darwin had been able to explain, to universal satisfaction, the...