THE THEORY OF USE-INHERITANCE. le 
The great poet may come of folk who never cultivated their 
imagination or turned a verse; the great composer, perhaps, 
is the child of some mediocre executant. Shakespeare, 
Goethe, left no genius to succeed them; the son of Mozart 
found more music in the chink of coin than in symphony or 
sonata. And even when we find a similar gift or talent 
repeating itself in generation after generation, it is not 
proved that the practice of this talent has so impressed itself 
on the germ as to cause hereditary transmission. Thus 
Weismann points out that, just as a child in acquiring a 
language starts where his parents began, so also, if he in- 
herits his father’s talents, musical or otherwise, he has only 
@ predisposition which cannot dispense with instruction. 
The greater talent which the son sometimes exhibits may 
depend on training in a congenial atmosphere; or it may 
spring from “fortuitous variations” in the sense of 
Darwin—“ variations which seem to us, in our ignorance, 
to arise spontaneously.” And in some succeeding genera- 
tion, a decline in the particular talent may be the result of 
other variations, or may be explained by the natural law 
. of regression towards mediocrity. 
The alcoholic habit acquired by a parent may possibly be 
transmitted. Mr. Francis Galton, who preceded Weismann 
in his scepticism of the transmission of acquired characters, 
is willing to admit an exception here, on the ground that 
the alcohol may so permeate the tissues as to affect the 
germ. This, of course, is a different thing from the in- 
heritance of definite somatic characters. But it is equally 
legitimate to suppose that a son, if he too acquires the 
alcoholic habit, has inherited the parents’ original tenden- 
cies. An impaired constitution may also have fallen to his 
lot; for no one doubts that badly nourished parents are 
likely to produce weakly children. If the mother be a 
drunkard, the child may be injured by the action of alcohol 
before birth; but this is an instance of the influence of 
environment, end ranks with the evil influences to which 
he may be afterwards be subject in a drunkard’s home. 
There are some repetitions of the drinking propensity which 
cannot be explained by the theory of the transmission of 
acquired habit. We find such strange coincidences as the 
following :—A man, after the birth of his children, becomes 
a drunkard, and deserts his wife and family. His son. long 
a total abstainer, marries a charming girl, to whom he is 
sincerely attached, and yet he too becomes a_ chronic 
drunkard, and wanders forth into space. In such cases, the 
hypothesis of the transmission of acquired habits will not 
