THE DARWINIAN THEORY 

 edifice, which was first based on the trans- 

 mission to offspring of advantageous vari- 

 ations to help them in their struggle for 

 existence. Herbert Spencer at once took 

 the alarm at Weismann's declaration and 

 exclaimed that without the transmission of 

 acquired characters there could be no evo- 

 lution, and like expressions came from 

 others and continued down to Sir Francis 

 Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, who in 

 his inaugural address as president of the 

 British Association of Science, at its meet- 

 ing in Dublin last year, declared that true 

 Darwinism must wage a war to the knife 

 against this dictum of Weismann. The 

 weight of opinion, however, among biol- 

 ogists seems at present to favor this con- 

 tention of Weismann, that acquired char- 

 acters are not transmitted, but when he 

 proceeds to show how he is as good a Dar- 

 winian as anybody by his purely specu- 

 lative views of what comes out of the chro- 

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