43^ Eimer on Growth and Inheritance 



darkness of complexion, one sees children of sucli dark parents with 

 quite fair flaxen hair and blue eyes.' 



Professor Eimer is a strong believer in the predominant 

 influence of the male parent. He regards this as at once the 

 cause of, and proved by, the fact that we are often able to 

 recognise family characteristics in pictures of the earliest 

 male ancestors to be found in galleries of family portraits. 



'If this prepotency of the male did not exist, if the female 

 element in all unions had exactly the same value as the male, then, 

 after comparatively few generations, all similarity to ancestors, ex- 

 cluding cases of one-sided reversion, would be completely effaced.' 



He adduces as palpable evidence of the truth of his view 

 the long persistence of the well-known Habsburg lip. 



' Portraits of Rudolf i. of Habsburg,' he tells us,^ ' already show 

 it. It was inherited by his descendants up till the last of them, the 

 Emperor Charles vi. (1740) — that is, for five hundred years. With 

 Charles vi. the male line of the Habsburgers became extinct. Its 

 place was supplied by the Thuringian line, derived from the marriage 

 of Francis of Thuringia with the Habsbiirger Maria Theresa. In the 

 male descendants of this couple the great under-lip appeared again, 

 and has been transmitted up to the present day, although the wives 

 of the Habsburgers, coming from various families, could not possibly 

 have possessed it by chance, and did not possess it.' 



These remarks about parental influences lead on to a 

 criticism of Kolliker's theory of evolution. According to that 

 naturalist it is the q^^, and not the adult organism, which 

 produces new forms of hfe. He conceives that the seminal 

 principles of creatures thus give rise to new varieties and 

 species through the stimulus of external conditions acting 

 upon internal causes. These internal causes, however, he 

 regards as being nothing essentially vital, but as the merely 

 physical and chemical conditions in which any organisms — 

 or, rather, the reproductive parts of organisms — happen to 

 find themselves. Kolliker's view is judged ^ by Eimer to be 

 ^ P. 4% 2 p^ 5], 



