V 



THE BEARING OF THE STUDY OF 



INSECTS UPON THE QUESTION 



'ARE ACQUIRED CHARACTERS 



HEREDITARY?' 



The Presidential Address read at the Annual Meeting of the Entomo- 

 logical Society of London, January iS, 1905. Reprinted from the 

 Proceedings of the Society, 1904, p. civ. 



Revised: addiiion lo footnote 2 on pp. 167-8. 



To those who indine to criticize the subject of this 

 Address as a raking of the embers of a dead and almost 

 forgotten fire, I would reply that the controversy which 

 sprang into sudden flame — in this country in the year 

 1887 — is still a great memory. I trust that it will ever 

 remain as a great memory. Of August Weismann it has 

 been well said that * he awoke us from our dogmatic 

 sleep'. He made us realize that cherished convictions 

 upon fundamental questions were based on nothing more 

 solid than assumptions, and thus administered the most 

 stimulating shock that has been received by the biological 

 world since the appearance of the Origin of Species, 



It was impossible that a controversy of this magnitude 

 could be conducted without frequent appeals to the 

 Insecta. Their structures, functions, and instincts offered 

 evidence so striking in character, and upon a scale so vast, 

 that discussion was inevitably attracted again and again 

 towards this centre. Indeed, the controversy would have 

 been but one-sided, the conclusion unconvincing, had it 

 been otherwise. At the same time discussion is and must 

 be free and, being free, is almost necessarily scattered. 

 To attempt therefore to disentangle from the mass and 

 to present as a whole the evidence offered by the study 



