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of enterprise to continue methods and use materials which 
only require to be thoroughly understood to insure a swift 
and sudden collapse for all but the most ephemeral purposes. 
I know no producer, scientific or other, whose self-respect 
would suffer the employment of materials, however good the 
effect, however low the cost, which would not last over so 
brief a period as five-and-twenty years. 
I desire to thank Mr. Horace Hart, Controller of the Oxford 
University Press, and Mr. J. W. North, A.R.A., for the kind 
manner in which they have freely given information on this 
most important matter. 
I now pass to the subject of my Address :— 
“THE BEARING OF THE’ STUDY OF INSECTS UPON THE QUESTION, 
‘ARE ACQUIRED CHARACTERS HEREDITARY!’ ” 
To those who incline to criticize the subject of this Address 
as a raking of the embers of a dead and almost forgotten fire, 
I would reply that the controversy which sprang into sudden 
flame—in this country in the year 1887—is still a great 
memory. I trust that it will ever remain as a great memory. 
Of August Weismann it has been well said that “he awoke 
us from our dogmatic sleep.” He made us realize that 
cherished convictions upon fundamental questions were based 
on nothing more solid than assumptions, and thus administered 
the most stimulating shock that has been received by the 
biological world since the appearance of the “Origin of 
Species.” 
It was impossible that a controversy of this magnitude 
could be conducted without frequent appeals to the Insecta. 
Their structures, functions, and instincts offered evidence so 
striking in character, and upon a scale so vast, that discussion 
was inevitably attracted again and again towards this centre. 
Indeed, the controversy would have been but one-sided, the 
conclusion unconvincing, had it been otherwise. At the same 
time discussion is and must be free and, being free, is almost 
necessarily scattered. To attempt therefore to disentangle 
from the mass and to present as a whole the evidence offered 
by the study of insects is of value in two ways. First, we are 
made to realize the importance of our study : by the contem- 
