2i8 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART iv 



or purblind. If any of these were suffering from mere 

 accidents to their eyes, they would of course on 

 Weismann's hypothesis beget a progeny having eye- 

 sight. But, if any had their vision congenitally dim 

 or dark, they would become the parents of those blind 

 fish which we know. 



Thus the facts give an uncertain answer, and we are 

 driven to make a statement of the blendings of fact with 

 hypothesis which have been championed on one side or 

 the other. Theories of heredity are invented to suit 

 the facts, so far as known, but they lie far beneath the 

 strata where verification is possible, at least in the 

 present state of our knowledge. 



The simplest and most natural assumption is that 

 the embryo, or its antecedents, spermatozoon and ovum, 

 owe their qualities directly to the parental organisms. 

 " The owl comes from the egg, but likewise the egg 

 comes from the owl." And this natural assumption 

 leaves the door open for the farther assumption that 

 acquired qualities will be inherited. I do not see that 

 it compels us to hold that view. An acquired quality 

 may be (as it were) only skin deep having no reaction 

 on the inner life of the organism not stamping its 

 mark there, and therefore not stamping its mark on the 

 offspring, which reproduces that inner life in a new 

 generation. If living shells, transported from a northern 

 sea to the Mediterranean, assume the same bright mark- 

 ings found in native Mediterranean forms, who will 

 believe that the change, however conspicuous, is the 

 same thing as transition to a different species ? They 

 are still essentially the same, and their offspring will be 

 essentially the same, bright if developed in the Mediter- 

 ranean, dull if developed in the north. But that the 

 deeper qualities of the parental life are all reproduced 



