Vol. XXvi] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS 45 



AUGUST WEISMANN, as his name commonly appeared, was 

 born in 1834, at Frankfurt-am-Main, and studied Zoology 

 under Henle at Gottingen and Leuckart in Giessen. Since 

 1866, he was Professor of Zoology and Director of the Zoo- 

 logical Institute of the University at Freiburg im Breisgau, 

 Baden. In later years he bore the titles of Exzellenz and \Yirk- 

 licher Geheimrat. The Royal Society of London elected him 

 a foreign member in 1910, and the Entomological Society of 

 London one of its twelve honorary fellows in 1898. He was 

 recently reported to have renounced all his English distinc- 

 tions. To zoologists generally and to the world at large he is 

 chiefly known for his writings on the theory of Evolution and 

 its correlations. The titles of the English translations of his 

 works on these subjects are familiar to a wide range of read- 

 ers : Studies in the Theory of Descent (translated by R. Mel- 

 dola), 1880-81 ; Essays Upon Hercdit\ and Kindred Biological 

 Problems (edited by E. B. Poulton and others), 2 vols., 1889 

 and 1892; The Germ Plasm, a Theory of Heredity, 1893; The 

 Evolution Theory, 2 vols., 1904; The Selection Theory (in 

 Seward's Danvin and Modern Science}, 1909. All of them 

 contain many references to insects. 



In these writings he emphasized the importance of the separ- 

 ation of the germ plasm from the somatic, or body, plasm 

 from the earliest stages of individual development, and ex- 

 posed the lack of definite evidence for the hereditary trans- 

 mission to offspring of characters acquired during the life of 

 an individual. In his famous controversy with Herbert 

 Spencer, in the Contemporary Review for 1893, he appeared 

 as the champion of the "All-Sufficiency of Natural Selection." 

 Still later, in 1895 ar >d 1896, he answered, theoretically at least, 

 many objections which had been brought against Natural Selec- 

 tion by the formulation of the idea of Germinal Selection. 



To \Yeismann are due such terms and expressions as bio- 

 phors, amphimixis, idants, determinants, ids, continuity of the 

 germ plasm, etc., which appeared so frequently in discussions 

 of evolution and heredity in the last decade of the nineteenth 

 century and the first of the twentieth, and during this period 

 no one influenced biological thought more than he. 



