Characters, Hereditary and Acquired. 45 



all congenital characters were originally acquired, 

 and afterwards became congenital on account of their 

 long inheritance. I do not myself advocate this view 

 as biologically probable, but merely state it as logically 

 possible, and in order to show that, so far as the 

 phenomena of heredity are concerned, there appears 

 to be no reason for Weismann's deduction that the 

 principle of Continuity, if true at all. must be absolute. 

 And it would further appear, the only reason why he 

 makes this deduction (stem of the Y) is in order to 

 provide a foundation for his further theories of evolu- 

 tion, &c. (arms of the Y). It is indeed necessary for 

 these further theories that body-changes should 

 never exercise any hereditary influence on the heredi- 

 tary endowments of germ-plasm, and therefore it is 

 that he posits the substance of heredity as, not only 

 continuous, but uninterruptably so " since the first 

 origin of life." 



Now, this may be made more clear by briefly com- 

 paring Weismann's theory with those of Darwin and 

 of Galton. Weismann's theory of heredity, then, 

 agrees with its predecessors which we are considering 

 in all the following respects. The substance of heredity 

 is particulate ; is mainly lodged in highly specialized 

 cells ; is nevertheless also distributed thoughout the 

 general cellular tissues, where it is concerned in all 

 processes of regeneration, repair, and a-sexual repro- 

 duction ; presents an enormously complex structure, 

 in that every constituent part of a potentially future 

 organism is represented in a fertilized ovum by cor- 

 responding particles; is everywhere capable of virtually 

 unlimited multiplication, without ever losing its here- 

 ditary endowments ; is often capable of carrying 



