390 The Study of Environment [Mar. 



organism with special reference to the Theorem of Le Chatelier. 



In a paper read at the twenty-eighth annual meeting of the 

 Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science in 1907, Lyon 

 describes some experiments in which an inheritance of acquired 

 characters seems to have occurred to some extent. Parallel experi- 

 ments were made with Iowa corn, which was grown simultaneously 

 in Iowa and in Nebraska for two years; and seed corn from the 

 Iowa Station, planted alongside the corn which had been brought 

 from Iowa two years before and which we may call the acclimated 

 corn. The acclimated corn (Snowflake White) showed marked 

 changes : the stalk had decreased almost a f 00t in height ; the ear 

 was nearly nine inches lower down on the stalk; the leaf area was 

 nearly twenty per cent. less ; and the date of tasselling was five days 

 earlier. Hera we get a distinct change in two years and the only ques- 

 tion is to what extent this change is due to a survival of the fittest. 

 Lyon says that there was no large elimination of plants through any 

 selective process, natural or artificial ; but we have no data in regard 

 to the Iowa corn during the two years that it was becoming accli- 

 mated in Nebraska. In some experiments with wheat, he says that 

 " the wheat seed from Iowa produced only twelve busheis of wheat 

 the first year in Nebraska, but the small crop was due to winter 

 killing and not to drought. The second year it produced twenty- 

 one busheis, and the third year twenty-three busheis." I should 

 call an elimination of half the crop a large one and for that reason 

 I should like to know more about the corn crop before drawing 

 final conclusions. The proper way to do these experiments would 

 be to take the seed from the place with the more severe winter to 

 the place with the less severe winter and not the other way round. 

 This would eliminate the selection due to winter killing. If a fair 

 sample of the whole crop was taken for seed each year, it ought not 

 to be difficult to establish the existence or non-existence of the 

 inheritance of adaptations caused by the action of the environment. 



I have tried to show that the biologists have jumbled things 

 together which do not belong together, and that they have reached 

 erroneous conclusions in consequence of their arbitrary and unjusti- 

 fiable stipulation that an acquired character shall only be considered 

 as inherited when it breeds true for several generations after a 

 return to the original conditions. 



