PACKARD. — INHERITANCE OP ACQUIRED CHARACTERS. 341 



Oil the one hand, let us imagine a cessation of the operation of this 

 principle. Suppose till the forces and stimuli of modern society to be 

 removed, and the human organism to live like blind beetles in a cave, 

 or a savage tribe isolated in the midst of an otherwise uninhabited con- 

 tinent, with a total uniformity of conditions, physical, social, and moral, 

 the effects of disuse would at once set in. Heredity without this vivify- 

 ing principle of cumulative transmission, as it might be called, would 

 be retrogressive in its action, aud the race would by reversion return to 

 the status of prehistoric times. Or, on the other hand, if the present 

 intellectual environment were maintained without the cumulative ac- 

 tion of the principle of inheritance of acquired characters, the social 

 organism would become stagnant, and the race would be semi-fossil- 

 ized, or in a state of arrested development, like the Chinese. 



As we have already suggested in the beginning, blastogenic or ac- 

 cpuired characters may have greatly preponderated over the somato- 

 genic, and in fact the former or acquired characters may have constituted 

 the fundamental elements of heredity iu general when life forms had 

 only got as far as the Monera and lowest Protophytes. Then as the 

 life forms became more differentiated there may have ensued a corre- 

 sponding specialization into both blastogenic and somatogenic charac- 

 ters. It seems most probable, as Kolliker suggested, that there is no 

 fundamental difference between the body and germ plasm, and such 

 a difference if it exists may be incapable of physical demonstration. 



Apropos of the view that whatever affects the body iu general must 

 have some effect, however slight, on the germ plasm in it, we would 

 cite the following facts and considerations. 



Mr. Herbert Spencer iu a powerful article in the Contemporary 

 Review for March, 1803, entitled "The Inadequacy of 'Natural 

 Selection,' " after quoting the facts regarding Lord Morton's hybrid 

 between a male quagga and a chestnut mare seven eighths Arabian, 

 and the results of crossing English and French breeds of sheep, and 

 Giles's "sow and her produce," as fatal to Weismann's theory of the 

 non-transmission of acquired characters, contends that these facts 

 demonstrate " that the somewhat different units of a foreign germ 

 plasm permeating the organism permeate also the subsequently formed 

 reproductive cells, and affect the structures of the individuals arising 

 from them." 



He then quotes Professor Sedgwick's letter to himself, dated December 

 27, 1892, referring to the continuity of the cells composing the tissues 

 of animals, so that the protoplasm of the whole body is continuous, 

 in which he states " that the connections between the cells of adults 



