134 DARWINISM TO-DAY. 



Lamarck, their position came to be known as neo- 

 Lamarckism. Herbert Spencer in England, Packard, 

 Osborn, and others in America, and Eimer in Ger- 

 many were prominent exponents of the anti-Weisman- 

 nian views. The debate was spirited, and engaged many 

 biological writers, and interested the general reading 

 public in the larger problems of biology more than it 

 has been interested at any other time since the great struggle 

 immediately following the publication of Darwin's "Origin 

 of Species." The best known part of the general debate 

 was that carried on directly by Weismann and Spencer in 

 the Contemporary Review (1893 and 1894). 



The general result of the struggle between neo-Darwin- 



ism and neo-Lamarckism can be fairly stated to be, that 



Weismann's assault on the theory of the in- 



j 



Concessions of heritance of acquired characters was in general 



Keo-Darwmians. 



successful ; while, on the other hand, the assault 

 of the anti-Weismannians on the assumptions of the isola- 

 tion and continuity of the germ-plasm and of the Alhnacht 

 of natural selection forced from Weismann and his follow- 

 ers, one by one and slowly, such radical concessions as to 

 make the latter doctrine utterly untenable, and to rob the 

 other of most of its significance in the consideration of modi- 

 fication and species-forming. The assumption of the com- 

 position of germ-plasm out of biophors and determinants 

 is of course merely an interesting speculation, or tentative 

 hypothesis, which, because it is untestable by scientific ob- 

 servation or experiment, cannot be debated to any particular 

 advantage. Weismann himself, in 1895, definitely conced- 

 ing that natural selection is radically weak at its base, being 

 incapable of explaining the beginnings of useful variations 

 and the development (which actually occurs) of indifferent 

 ones, proposed a new and radically un-Darwinian theory 

 under the name of Germinal Selection. This theory (ex- 

 plained in chapter viii of this book) although including the 



