30 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 



presented by him on June 13, 1872, to the Royal Society of 

 L,ondon and published in its proceedings.* In this paper 

 stress is laid upon the distinction in embryonic development 

 between what he calls the ''patent" and the "latent" ele 

 ments, and he argues from the facts of reversion and atavism 

 that the greater part of the parental elements in heredity are 

 latent in the germ, but prepared to express themselves in 

 more or less remote decendants. Although he addresses 

 himself to the anthropologist rather than the biologist, and 

 claims only to be making a contribution to the difficult sub 

 ject of kinship, he nevertheless evinces a clear grasp of the 

 embryonic conditions of the problem, and as we shall see, 

 anticipates, some of the more exact conceptions of Weismann. 

 He does not wholly deny the possibility of the transmission 

 of acquired characters, but says that ' ' the effects of use and 

 disuse of limbs, and those of habit, are transmitted to pos 

 terity in only a very slight degree. ' ' 



In this respect Mr. Galton makes only a slight advance 

 toward the conclusions of Weismann in the much more elabo 

 rate paper which he read before the Anthropological Institute 

 of Great Britain on November 9, 1875, and which appeared in 

 the December number or the Contemporary Review for that 

 year, and also in an expanded form in the Journal of the Insti 

 tute (Vol. V, p. 329). In this paper which is entitled "A 

 Theory of Heredity," he, however, approaches the main ques 

 tion with much greater directness. "The facts " he says "for 

 which a complete theory of heredity must account may con 

 veniently be divided into two groups ; the one refers to those 

 inborn or congenital peculiarities that were also congenital in 

 one or more ancestors, the other to those that were not con 

 genital in the ancestors, but were acquired for the first time by 



*Vol. XX, p. 394. 



