Xll 



co-ordinated bodily movements of the higher animals, the performance 

 of which involves the co-operation of a complicated system of sense 

 organs, sensory nerves, centres, motor nerves, and muscles ; it being 

 obvious that the power of so co-ordinating the actions of these various 

 parts as to ensure the accomplishment of the required purpose is as 

 certainly transmitted to offspring by inheritance as any morphological 

 character. All that Romanes has written on this subject volumi- 

 nous as it is is in complete accord with Mr. Herbert Spencer's 

 contention, that the " coadaptatioii of parts cannot be accounted for 

 by the natural selection of variations arising fortuitously." This 

 doctrine he did his best to corroborate by new examples, considering 

 Mr. Spencer's line of argument exceedingly " cogent against all ultra- 

 Darwinians." 



In dealing with the much more difficult question of the direct 

 evidence for or against the inheritance of acquired characters, 

 Romanes found the same difficulties as other naturalists. It is well 

 known that for many years he sought, with praiseworthy persever- 

 ance, to verify the experimental results obtained by the late Dr. 

 Brown-Sequard as regards the transmission to offspring of certain 

 structural defects and pathological tendencies, originally produced in 

 guinea-pigs by injuries of the central nervous system. Although 

 some of the experiments made for this purpose yielded interesting 

 results, the appearances observed were not sufficiently constant or 

 decisive to enable him to confirm Brown-Sequard's conclusions. In 

 addition to these experiments of his own, he was unceasing in his 

 efforts to bring together all the experimental evidence that he could 

 get hold of, either by reading or correspondence, relating to the con- 

 ditions under which structural modifications produced by environment 

 persist in the offspring of plants and animals for many generations, 

 independently of the external conditions which originally produced 

 them. On the question of so-called Telegony, he endeavoured to 

 obtain information, partly by correspondence, partly by experiments 

 (see ' Contemporary Review,' 1893, p. 512). To what extent these 

 efforts were productive, the writer is unable to say, but there seems 

 reason to hope that the collected evidence, when published in the 

 forthcoming second volume of ' Darwin, and after Darwin,' will be of 

 considerable interest. It may be noted that, although Romanes 

 agrees with Mr. Spencer in regarding telegony, if true, to be fatal to 

 the doctrine of " Germplasm," his idea of its mechanism is different. 



During the year which preceded his death, Romanes published the 

 work entitled ' An Examination of Weismannism.' Its purpose, as 

 stated in the Preface, was not to discuss either the question of the 

 inheritance of acquired characters, with which Professor Weismann's 

 name is so closely associated, or the conception of the architecture of 

 germplasm, which is no less essential to his general theory. What 



