CHAPTER II. 



CHARACTERS AS HEREDITARY AND ACQUIRED 

 (PRELIMINARY). 



WE will proceed to consider, throughout Section I 

 of the present work, the most important among those 

 sundry questions which have come to the front 

 since the death of Darwin. For it was in the year 

 after this event that Weismann published the first 

 of his numerous essays on the subject of Heredity, 

 and, unquestionably, it has been these essays which 

 have given such prominence to this subject during 

 the last decade. 



At the outset it is desirable to be clear upon 

 certain points touching the history of the subject ; 

 the limits within which our discussion is to be con- 

 fined ; the relation in which the present essay stands 

 to the one that I published last year under the 

 title An Examination of Weismannism ; and several 

 other matters of a preliminary kind. 



The problems presented by the phenomena of 

 heredity are manifold ; but chief among them is 

 the hitherto unanswered question as to the trans- 

 mission or non-transmission of acquired characters. 

 This is the question to which the present Section 

 will be confined. 



Although it is usually supposed that this question 



