66 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 



comprehensive, and organized materials for thinking and 

 working which modern methods of education could alone 

 have given them, use these materials, and take advantage 

 of this training to spin out a subtle thread of reasoning 

 which results in condemning the only means by which 

 they were enabled to comprehend questions of this nature. 

 Professor Weismann could never have prosecuted those pro 

 longed investigations which have given him such a grasp of 

 the intricate problem of heredity had he not been trained in 

 the rigid methods of the German tiniversities. Nay, those 

 rigid methods themselves have been the product of a series of 

 generations of such training, transmitted in small increments 

 and diffused in increasing effectiveness to the whole German 

 people. It has not been brought about by natural selection 

 which only selects such ancestral germ-plasms as increase the 

 certainty of reproduction. Such habits of mind could have 

 no such tendency. They secure no advantage in the struggle 

 for existence. And the fact that out of the barbaric German 

 hordes of the Middle Ages there has been developed the great 

 modern race of German specialists is one of the most convinc 

 ing proofs of the transmission of acquired characters, as well 

 as of the far-reaching value to the future development of the 

 race of such an educational system as that which Germany 

 has had for the last two or three centuries. 



It was said of Mr. Darwin that he was himself a good illus 

 tration of the law of atavism which he formulated since his 

 habit of mind lay latent in his father and came to him from his 

 grandfather Erasmus. Similarly it might be said that Professor 

 Weismann is as good an example as need be asked of the trans 

 mission of acquired characters and of the hereditary embodiment 

 of that wide-spread German characteristic which has been the 

 increasing product of the German educational system and of 

 German institutions. 



