6 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 
of the work is headed (p. 536), “Laws of the Animal 
Economy in Regard to the Hereditary Transmission of 
Peculiarities of Structure”; the brief title at the head of the 
pages runs ‘‘ Laws of Nature in Hereditary Transmission ”. 
This discussion, which forestalls by more than half a century 
the considerations and conclusions of recent writers and 
especially of Professor Weismann, is opened by the state- 
ment that physiological writers have often inquired ‘‘ what 
peculiarities of structure are liable to be transmitted by 
parents to their offspring, and what terminate with the 
individual without affecting the race. Perhaps the following 
remark,” the author goes on to say, ‘‘may afford the solution 
of this inquiry ”. 
I must now quote without any omission the succeeding 
two paragraphs in which the two classes of characters— 
inherent and acquired—are defined, as fully and clearly 
as they have ever been, and the opinion is strongly ex- 
pressed that the former are transmissible, the latter non- 
transmissible by heredity :— 
“Tt appears to be a general fact, that all connate varieties 
of structure, or peculiarities which are congenital, or which 
form a part of the natural constitution impressed on an 
individual from his birth, or rather from the commencement 
of his organization, whether they happen to descend to him 
from a long inheritance, or to spring up for the first time in 
his own person—for this is perhaps altogether indifferent— 
are apt to re-appear in his offspring. It may be said, in 
other words, that the organization of the offspring is always 
modelled according to the type of the original structure of 
the parent. 
“On the other hand, changes produced by external 
causes in the appearance or constitution of the individual 
are temporary, and, in general, acquired characters are 
transient ; they terminate with the individual, and have no 
influence on the progeny.” 
At this point the author adds a most interesting foot- 
note in which he tells us (p. 537) that ‘this distinction, 
which has not been pointed out by any former writer on 
physiological subjects, was first suggested to me in conversa- 
