350 Kansas Academy of Science. 



zoologist. These body-transformations of lower organisms have 

 not been established by man-made mutilations; environments can- 

 not of themselves produce inheritable modifications; the only 

 efficient agent, therefore, is the life within the organism. As to 

 certainty, so long as life is a variable, so long as life is a law unto 

 itself, we must reply that certainty in the very nature of the case 

 cannot exist. He alone who has within himself the spirit of dis- 

 cernment of what life has done can exercise the spirit of prophecy 

 and foretell what life may do; he must be in very truth a biologist, 

 and not be heavily tinctured with the formalism of the mathema- 

 tician, the physicist and the chemist. 



Whether the inheritance of acquired characters shall result in 

 an orthogenetic, saltatory or rameal evolution of a race depends on 

 the many small, conscious choices of many lives, made in few or 

 many generations, to better meet the conditions of a changing en- 

 vironment. 



In conclusion, then, it is necessary merely to reaffirm what has 

 been several times stated in this paper. The Weismann hypothesis 

 is clearly untenable, for it is life that carries and transmits inher- 

 ited characters and that compels matter to obey it through energy. 



