EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES SINCE DARWIN 237 



Darwin promulgated it, has dropped out of congidera- '" 

 tion almost entirely. DeVries of recent years has re- 

 vised it, but with distinct modifications, and most bi- 

 ologists pay no attention to it. 



There is a school of biologists, headed by Weiss- 

 man, who have come to be known as Neo-Darwinians.^ 

 These men have insisted that Natural Selection, if 

 properly understood and developed, is quite sufficient 

 to account for the fact of evolution, including the ap- 

 pearance of variations. Weissman himself is a micro- 

 scopist of more than common skill. He is thoroughly 

 accomplished in the most modern methods of killing,' 

 fixing, staining, and mounting. This worker's ac- 

 quaintance with the intimate structure of the cell is 

 probably as great as that of any other man in the 

 world. Weissman asserts that he has seen inside the 

 nucleus all the machinery necessary to explain how 

 the father hands over his qualities to his children. He y 

 insists, equally strongly, that this process is such that 

 no father can hand to his child any qualities which 

 he himself did not have at least in potentiality at his 

 birth. Everything the individual acquires during his 

 lifetime is his own possession, which he may use and 

 develop to the utmost extent, but it dies with him. -^ 

 His children, born after he possesses it, can no more 

 inherit it than those born before. Weissman ex- 

 pressed this in his famous statement that "There is 



