PARENTS RELATION TO CHILD. 121 



That parts are developed in offspring indepen- t 

 dently of those parts in parents is clear. 

 Mutilated parents transmit patfs which they do 

 not possess. The offspring of young parents cannot 

 inherit the later stages of life from parents who / / 

 have not passed through them. Cases of remote 

 reversion or atavism show that ancestral pecu- 

 liarities can transmit themselves in a latent or 

 undeveloped condition for hundreds or thousands 

 of generations. Many obvious facts compelled 

 Darwin to suppose that vast numbers of the repro- 

 ductive gemmules in an individual are not thrown 

 off by his own cells, but are the self-multiplying 

 progeny of ancestral gemmules. Galton restricts 

 the production of gemmules by the personal 

 structure to a few exceptional cases, and would 

 evidently like to dispense with pangenesis alto- 

 gether, if he could only be sure that acquired 

 characters are never inherited. Weismann en- 

 tirely rejects pangenesis and the inheritance of 



