182 A REMARKABLE ANTICIPATION OF 



and the resulting injuries are continued unabated. ' If, 

 however, an experiment be wanting to prove that repeti- 

 tion effects no difference in the results,' he points to the 

 practice of circumcision which has gone on for some 

 thousands of years without producing any hereditary 

 change. 



Prichard argues that such non-transmission is beneficial, 

 in fact he contends ' that all the laws of nature, or the 

 general plans which we trace through the organized 

 world, tend uniformly to produce beneficial effects, though 

 particular evils are sometimes contingent upon their 

 operation'. With regard to this instance he points out 

 that, if such transmission took place, both man and 

 animals would practically become more and more ' muti- 

 lated and defective '. 



The author next proceeds to consider the effects of 

 disease, introducing the subject in the following paragraph : 

 ' We cannot discern any essential circumstance, in which 

 changes produced by art, or by casual injury, differ from 

 those which are effected by other external causes. We 

 should therefore suppose from analogy that the latter are 

 not more communicable to posterity than the former, and 

 this presumption is confirmed when we inquire into facts.' 



He points out that the constitutional effects of many 

 diseases ('small-pox, measles, scarlatina, hooping-cough'), 

 rendering those who have suffered from them more or 

 less immune, are never hereditary. Without attempting to 

 explain in what the change consists, he rightly claims it 

 as a ' permanent state of the constitution, which lasts as 

 long as the individual. . . . Those imperceptible modifi- 

 cations in the bodily structure which render the constitution 

 incapable of being acted upon by certain morbid poisons 

 are governed by the same law, as far as regards heredi- 

 tary descent, as the observable changes of form which 

 are induced by art or accident '. 



At this point the writer intercalates another clear 

 statement of the essential distinction between inherent 

 hereditary and acquired non-hereditary characters. The 

 statement is so admirable that I quote it in full. 



' We may remark in general that each individual being, 



