ACQUIRED CHARACTERS xlvii 



have set up for the express purpose of deceiving investigators, 

 and which a pioneer is almost dead certain to fall into ? 

 Why should it have occurred to Lamarck to inquire whether 

 the origin of a variation may affect its heritabihty ? In 

 point of fact it never did occur to him. The problem of 

 inheritance of acquired characters never presented itself to 

 his mind : he never differentiated them from congenital 

 variations. There was for him no antithesis between the 

 two : the antithesis to use-inheritance was for him special 

 creation and fixity of species. It was these latter doctrines 

 that he mainly desired to attack, in the interests of an 

 evolutionary theory ; and he could not understand how 

 evolution could have occurred without use-inheritance. 

 But he never had before him the elements of the problem, 

 as presented to modern minds. Had he lived in modern 

 times, it is just as likely that he would have been a neo- 

 Darwinian as a neo-Lamarckian. He saw that structures 

 were adapted to their functions : hence, he argued, either 

 the structure must create the function, involving special 

 creation and design, or else the function must create the 

 structure, involving inheritance of acquired characters. 

 When once the problem is stated in this way, we see that 

 Lamarck unquestionably chose the less untenable and 

 more plausible of the two theories. 



How natural this oversight was, is borne in upon us by 

 the fact that at the present time almost everyone who is 

 not a biologist holds just the same opinion as Lamarck did, 

 on hearing the theory stated for the first time. Disbelief 

 in the inheritance of acquired characters is almost limited 

 to trained biologists, though among them it is almost universal. 

 Lamarck then committed an exceedingly natural and par- 

 donable oversight, when he failed to observe that variations 

 from the mean specific type are not all on a par, but are of 

 two wholly different kinds. And it may even be that the 

 future will determine that the two kinds are not after all 

 so different as is commonly held. We now believe that 

 the congenital variations — strictly called variations — are 



