Biological Papers. 349 



The writer of this paper believes that Weismann's hypothesis is 

 fundamentally wrong. Life, not matter, bears inherited qualities. 

 Life manages matter through energy for its own convenience while 

 developing its powers. Life as we know it is not bounded by cell- 

 walls but pervades the whole body in a general way, and provides 

 for itself special lines of communication along nerve-fibers to con- 

 trol those parts which dp work instinctively. The generative cells 

 and the conscious powers are in especially close communication. 



The first activity of the first organism must have been con- 

 sciously performed. The nature of life is and was such that repe- 

 tition bred habits, and habits persisted in for many generations 

 became instincts and were then hereditary. 



This body of instincts recruited from habits became in the 

 simple and more complex organisms a great conserving influence, 

 and prevented sudden change of method of living and doing. Body- 

 building instincts, as all know, can seldom be entirely obliterated. 

 The human embryo still has gills. Such instincts can be buried 

 beneath better ones, but can seldom be destroyed. 



So conscious activities in highly organized beings like man can 

 do little to modify the growth of the body in its more primitive 

 parts, and are powerful chiefly in directing the growth of the parts 

 lately acquired, like the mammalian brain and the voluntary mus- 

 cles. But all parts of the body can be modified through the effects 

 of use and disuse, for a persistence on the part of life of the use or 

 disuse of tissues and organs recently or long established, because of 

 a permanently changed environment or habit of life, continued for 

 many generations, has certainly resulted in a modification of the 

 body-building instincts. Animals found in caves are minus eyes 

 but possess greatly enlarged touclj organs. Water-animals that 

 have acquired the land habit, like the lung fish; snakes that have 

 lost their limbs through disuse; land animals, like the whale and 

 seal, that have become adapted to the water life, and many series of 

 fossil forms, all prove the potency of life to change the body wh^n 

 the need arises. The germ-cells are intimately connected with the 

 soma cells in a general way by a sort of wireless telegraphy and 

 specifically by means of countless nerve-fibers. This intimate as- 

 sociation is shown unmistakably in young animals when the re- 

 moval of a portion of the germinal tissues is followed by a great 

 change in the development of the rest of the body, and by the great 

 influence of the mind and body over the germ-plasm during every 

 moment of the maturing life of the individual. 



But where is your certainty that life has made and can make 

 such body-transforming volitions ? asks, in substance, a leading 



