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‘The children of accomplished pianists do not inherit the 
art of playing the piano: they have to learn it in the same 
laborious manner as that by which their parents acquired it ; 
they do not inherit anything except that which their parents 
possessed when children, viz.: manual dexterity and a good 
ear.” * 
“Chinese women not born with distorted feet.” + 
These statements show that their authors are absolutely 
unacquainted with the law of earlier inheritance. Do they 
mean to say that only the characters with which the offspring 
is born are inherited, and that those which appear later in life 
are not inherited characters? Let me apply the same reason- 
ing to other things and see where it leads. 
The human infant is born without eyebrows, and without 
teeth—therefore eyebrows and teeth are not inherited cha- 
racters. The offspring only inherit what their fathers had as 
infants; and they have to get their teeth in the same laborious 
manner as that by which their parents cut theirs. 
The male infant is born without a beard; calves are born 
without horns; birds without feathers; plants first appear 
without flowers; and so on. Therefore all these features— 
beards, horns, etec.—cannot be transmitted by the parents. 
Why, however, should the period of birth be taken as the 
time when transmitted characters are to be seen. Birth is 
not the beginning of life, but only an episode therein. One 
might with equal reason take the very first stage of life and say, 
“Man begins life as an unicellular organism, and since this 
does not shew sundry characters which might be named, these 
certain characters are not transmitted by the parent ”—a 
reductio ad absurdum. 
Looking, however, at the cases quoted above, we see that 
by the law of earlier inheritance all we have a right to expect 
is that ontogeny shall repeat ontogeny. Weismann admits 
that the child would inherit what its father had as a child. 
*Dr August Weismann, “Essays on Heredity,’ English Trans.; p. 269; 
Oxford, 1889. 
+ Dr Russell Wallace. ‘‘ Darwinism,” p. 440. 
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