ACQUIRED CHARACTERS. 43 



of their nature. The habits, education, and mode of 

 life the environment in fact, has brought about 

 changes in the animal's organism, and these changes, 

 which must of necessity be very slight in the first case, 

 are transmitted to the progeny. With each generation 

 the changes are deepened by persistence in the peculiar 

 mode of life, and in the course of a few generations 

 we have a stock of animals which take to a particular 

 work " instinctively." The offspring have not inherited 

 any part of the education of their ancestors, but they 

 have inherited their organisation as modified by their 

 peculiar mode of life: in other words, they have 

 inherited a strong predisposition toward the ways of 

 their progenitors, just as a child inherits a predisposi- 

 tion to the ways of its ancestors. As well might we 

 expect the daughter of the costermonger to take on 

 the modesty and gentleness and tenderness of nature 

 which stamps the daughter of the family noted for 

 these virtues for generations, as to find the qualities of 

 the sheep-dog in the terrier, or those of the greyhound 

 in the bull-dog. 



And if this be so if it be true, as we believe it is 

 that all characters acquired have an effect upon the 

 offspring, how careful should each one be not to do 

 anything which may leave a stain upon posterity. 

 " The evil that a man does lives after him " lives not 

 merely as the poet meant it, in the minds of other 

 men, or upon the blotted page of a wasted life. There 

 it does live ; but if we wish to know it all, let us read 

 it in the lives of his unfortunate children. 



