ii6 ARE THE EFFECTS OF USE INHERITED? 



rather than of the effect of the parents' hard 

 travelling. Horses congenitally liable to such 

 formations would transmit the liability, 1 and 

 this might readily be mistaken for inheritance of 

 the results of the liability. An apparent increase 

 in this liability might arise from greater attention 

 being now paid to it, or from increased use of 

 harder roads ; or a real increase might be due to 

 panmixia and some obscure forms of correlation. 



QUASI-INHERITANCE. 



Of course artificially-caused ill-health or weak- 

 ness in parents will tend in a general way to 

 injure the offspring. But deterioration thus 

 caused is only a form of quasi-inheritance, as I 

 should prefer to call it. Semi-starvation in a new- 

 born babe is not truly inherited from its half-starved 

 mother, but is the direct result of insufficient 



1 Variation of Animals and Plants tinder Domestication, ii. 290 ; 

 i- 454- 



