A REMARKABLE ANTICIPATION, ELC. 9 
generations, a sort of habit may be acquired, by which the 
new state becomes as it were natural, and may thus modify 
the race”. To this he replies that the evidence of such 
habit could only be obtained by diminishing the mutilation 
in progressive generations and comparing the result; whereas 
in all such cases the violence committed and the resulting 
injuries are continued unabated. “If, however, an expert- 
ment be wanting to prove that repetition effects no difference 
in the results,” he points to the practice of circumcision 
which has gone on for some thousands of years without 
producing any hereditary change. 
Prichard argues that such non-tranmission is beneficial, 
in fact he contends ‘that all the laws of nature, or the 
general plans which we trace through the organized 
world, tend uniformly to produce beneficial effects, though 
particular evils are sometimes contingent upon their opera- 
tion”. With regard to this instance he points out that, if such 
transmission took place, both man and animals would prac- 
tically become more and more ‘ mutilated and defective ”. 
The author next proceeds to consider the effects of 
disease, introducing the subject in the following paragraph : 
“we cannot discern any essential circumstance in which 
changes produced by art or by casual injury differ from 
those which are effected by other external causes. We 
should therefore suppose from analogy that the latter are 
not more communicable to posterity than the former, and 
this presumption is confirmed when we inquire into facts.” 
He points out that the constitutional effects of many 
diseases (“small-pox, measles, scarlatina, whooping-cough”), 
rendering those who have suffered from them more or less 
immune, are never hereditary. Without attempting to 
explain in what the change consists, he rightly claims it as 
“a permanent state of the constitution, which lasts as long 
as the individual. . . . Those imperceptible modifications in 
the bodily structure which render the constitution incapable 
of being acted upon by certain morbid poisons are governed 
by the same law, as far as regards hereditary descent, as 
the observable changes of form which are induced by art or 
accident.” 
