INHERITANCE OF ACQUIREMENTS 61 



mother is affected, the children have not been imperfectly 

 nourished in utero and thus rendered more susceptible to tuber- 

 culosis and to all other forms of infection, or in the case of alcohol- 

 ism that the lowered vitality of the children is not due to the 

 lack of care and general home misery which so often accompanies 

 maternal alcoholism, and becomes pronounced when both parents 

 are alcoholics ? For absolute evidence we are reduced to the 

 study of conditions in which the soma of the male parent has 

 been subjected to particular influences, and have to observe, 

 first, whether those influences have, judged by the condition 

 of the progeny, had influences of any order upon his germ cells, 

 and secondly, whether under any conditions the influences 

 which act upon the soma, or more accurately the tissues in 

 general of the male parent, produce identical disturbances in 

 the children. Clearly there are the two conditions of what may 

 be termed indirect and direct or identical inheritance. 



Now, in the first place, we have clear evidence that the germ 

 cells are not, after the Weismannian conception (as usually 

 accepted), so sacrosanct that they are insusceptible to influences 

 which affect the body at large. Even though their growth is 

 restricted still they have to grow, and they have to maintain 

 existence, and growing they must absorb and assimilate material 

 brought to them by the blood and diffusing from the blood into 

 the lymph. If that lymph contains soluble toxic substances, 

 the germ cells are not precluded from absorbing them as do the 

 other cells of the body — and, like those other cells, from being 

 influenced by them. I have brought these examples forward 

 on previous occasions, and they have never been rebutted ; on 

 the contrary, the evidence of this order is steadily increasing. 



Take first the oldest carefully studied example, that afforded 

 by Constantin Paul 1 in the 'fifties, in his studies upon the 

 effect upon workers exposed to lead : of 32 pregnancies in which 

 the husband alone was exposed to lead, there resulted 12 abortions ; 

 and of the 20 children born alive, 8 did not survive the first year, 

 4 died during the second year, and 5 during the third year. 

 And the lead appears to have a particular influence upon the 

 nervous system, for numerous other observers have called 

 attention to the frequency of epilepsy, idiocy, and imbecility 

 in the children of workers in lead. Nor need I recall that lead 



1 Arch. gen. de medecine, xv., I860, 513. 



