HEREDITY OF ACQUIRED CHARACTERS — CUENOT. 345 



mild infection of their young? From this fact, the latter, becoming 

 immune in their turn, would be capable of agglutinating the typhoid 

 bacillus and even of transferring their immunity to the second gen- 

 eration). 



Thus we begin to see, taking as a basis the experiment of Guyer 

 and Smith, that we will be able to understand and admit the heredity 

 of certain characters acquired through nonuse or even through use, 

 a question which places in wide opposition the Lamarckist school 

 and the mutationist school. It may be that an organ affected by 

 individual nonuse (the eye, for example, of an animal living in total 

 darkness) produces specific modifications in the body fluids, a kind 

 of lysis, if you wish, which would affect the representative sub- 

 stances in the germinal cells, and would lead gradually to the heredi- 

 tary atrophy of the organ. 



I sincerely hope that the experiments of Guyer and Smith may be 

 done again more rigorously, in order to put an end to the discussions 

 on the heredity of acquired characters and the intimate constitution 

 of the hereditary patrimony. Only then will it be possible to build 

 on a solid foundation a theory of the evolution of living beings. 



