14 RETROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT IN NATURE. [IX. 



In the first place, it compels us to assume as a fact what has 

 often been asserted, but never yet proved, viz. the hereditary 

 transmission of acquired characters. 



It is well known that many mental and physical qualities of 

 parents are transmitted to their children, such as the colour of 

 the eyes and hair, the shape and size of the finger-nails ; and 

 not only these but, as everyone knows, even such minute and 

 indefinable physical and mental characteristics as likeness of 

 features, bearing, gait, handwriting, a mild and equable or 

 passionate and irritable temperament. But all these characters 

 are blastogenic, or inherent in the parents ; whether they first 

 show themselves early or late, they have existed in the parents 

 in a more or less marked degree and in different combinations, 

 from the beginning. Characters only acquired by the operation 

 of external circumstances acting during the life of the indi- 

 vidual, cannot be transmitted. The loss of a finger is not 

 inherited ; all the thousand faculties which are gained by the 

 exercise of various organs or of the whole body are purely 

 personal acquirements, and are not handed down to posterity. 

 No case was ever known of a child being able to read without 

 being taught, even though the parents had exercised their 

 faculties in this direction all their lives. Children do not even 

 learn to speak untaught, although not only their parents, but 

 countless generations of ancestors, have exercised and per- 

 fected the brain and vocal organs by learning and speaking 

 a language. It may now be considered as satisfactorily 

 established that children of civilized nations, if brought up in 

 a wilderness and cut off from all communication with man, 

 would make no attempt at speech. For proof of this I need 

 not fall back on the not very well authenticated story of the 

 Persian monarch, who is said to have made the cruel experi- 

 ment of taking twenty new-born children and bringing them 

 up together, without ever allowing them to hear a word of 

 human speech ; they are supposed never to have made any 

 sound resembling speech, but to have imitated with great 

 fidelity the bleating of a goat which lived among them. The 

 same thing is told in all the well-known cases of young or 

 adult persons found living in an utterly wild state in the woods, 

 cases which have occurred from time to time up to the last 

 century in Germany, France, England and Russia. Nearly all 



