436 THE SUPPOSED TRANSMISSION OF MUTILATIONS. 



nowadays to maintain his view with such certainty, ' for it must 

 be admitted that the transmission of acquired characters may take 

 place at any rate as a rare exception.' Similar opinions are often 

 expressed, especially in conversation, and yet they can mean 

 nothing except that the transmission of acquired characters has l^een 

 proved ; for if such transmission can take place at all, it exists, and 

 it does not make the least difference theoretically whether it occurs 

 in rare cases or more frequently. Sometimes heredity has been 

 called capricious, and in a certain sense this is true. Heredity 

 appears to be capricious because we cannot penetrate into its depths : 

 we cannot predict whether any peculiar character in the father will 

 reappear in the child, and still less whether it will reappear in the 

 first, second, or one of the later children : we cannot predict whether 

 a child will possess the nose of his father or mother or one of the 

 grandparents. But this certainly does not imply that the results 

 are due to chance : no one has the right to doubt that everything is 

 brought about by the operation of certain laws, and that, with the 

 fertilization of the egg, the shape of the nose of the future child 

 has been determined. The co-operation of the two tendencies of 

 development contained in the two conjugating germ-cells produces 

 of necessity a certain form of nose. The observed facts enable us to 

 know something of the laws under which such events take place. 

 Thus, for instance, among a large number of children of the same 

 parents some will always have the form of the nose of the mother or 

 of the mother's family ; others will have the nose of the father's 

 family, and so on. 



If we apply this argument to the supposed transmission of muti- 

 lations, such transmission, if possible at all, must occur a certain 

 number of times in a certain number of cases : it must occur more 

 readily when both parents are mutilated in the same way, or when 

 the mutilation has been repeated in many generations, etc. It is 

 extremely improbable that it would suddenly occur in a case where 

 it w r as least expected, while it did not occur in 900 cases of the 

 most favourable kind. Those who recognise in the doubtful cases 

 of transmission of a single mutilation present in only one of the 

 parents, proofs of the existence of the disputed operation of heredity, 

 quite forget that the transmission presupposes a very marvellous 

 and extremely complex apparatus which if present at all ought, 

 under certain conditions, to become manifest regularly, and not only 



