84 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



mitted, or whether it is not rather a natural aptitude, 

 which existed prior to the habit. This aptitude would 

 have remained inherent in the germ-plasm which the 

 individual bears within him, as it was in the individual 

 himself and consequently in the germ whence he 

 sprang. Thus, for instance, there is no proof that 

 the mole has become blind because it has formed the 

 habit of living underground ; it is perhaps because 

 its eyes were becoming atrophied that it condemned 

 itself to a life underground. 1 If this is the case, 

 the tendency to lose the power of vision has been 

 transmitted from germ to germ without anything 

 being acquired or lost by the soma of the mole itself. 

 From the fact that the son of a fencing-master has 

 become a good fencer much more quickly than his 

 father, we cannot infer that the habit of the parent has 

 been transmitted to the child ; for certain natural dis 

 positions in course of growth may have passed from the 

 plasma engendering the father to the plasma engender 

 ing the son, may have grown on the way by the effect 

 of the primitive impetus, and thus assured to the son a 

 greater suppleness than the father had, without troubling, 

 so to speak, about what the father did. So of many 

 examples drawn from the progressive domestication of 

 animals : it is hard to say whether it is the acquired habit 

 that is transmitted or only a certain natural tendency 

 that, indeed, which has caused such and such a particular 

 species or certain of its representatives to be specially 

 chosen for domestication. The truth is, when every 

 doubtful case, every fact open to more than one inter 

 pretation, has been eliminated, there remains hardly a 



1 Cudnot, &quot;La Nouvelle Theorie transfonniste&quot; (Revue gSn/rale dei 

 sciences, 1894). Cf. Morgan, Evolution and Adaptation, London, 1903, 

 P- 357- 



