THEORIES OF EVOLUTION 27 



dren to a white father, she would not transmit anything she 

 acquired, for intercourse with a negro does not make her 

 dark. Telegony and the transmission of maternal impressions 

 therefore cannot furnish argument for the Lamarckian 

 doctrine. Were they true, which they are not, they would 

 merely furnish arguments for the much more reasonable 

 doctrine that changes in the parental mind or body may, in 

 this or that other way, affect children subsequently born a 

 very different thing from the doctrine which affirms the 

 transmission of acquired characters. 1 



45. The effects of various diseases are supposed to supply 

 evidence. Heredity in relation to disease will be one of the 

 principal topics of this work ; but there are one or two points 

 which may be conveniently dealt with here. Gout is con- 

 stantly instanced in medical works as affording evidence. 

 The sins of the father are thought to be visited on the heads 

 of the children. Here diathesis i. e. predisposition, tendency 

 an inborn trait, is confused with disease, an acquirement. 

 Some men are so constituted that, under fit conditions, they 

 tend to develop gout; the children inherit the inborn trait, 

 the diathesis, and under like conditions tend in turn to 

 develop the same disease. But there is no evidence that 

 parental high living influences, in the slightest degree, the 

 liability of the child to gout, nor even that generations of 

 high living tend to evolve the gouty diathesis in a self- 

 indulgent race. The children of poor Irish peasants, when 

 removed from their normally miserable surroundings into a 

 more comfortable environment, are as liable to gout as the 

 scions of the British aristocracy. In fact, judging by the 

 analogy of other diseases, it is probable that, were gout very 

 prevalent and a considerable cause of death or serious dis- 

 ablement, the race that was most afflicted by it would, by 

 the weeding out of the unfit, become in time the most 

 resistant to it, the least liable under given conditions to 

 contract it. 



1 Professor J. Cosser Ewart's classic Penicuik experiments are con- 

 clusive against telegony. (Vide The Penicuik Experiments, A. and C. 

 Black. London : 1899.) It has been alleged by no one that the children 

 of lady doctors and hospital nurses are particularly liable to malforma- 

 tions. " Dr. William Hunter, in the last century, told my father that 

 during many years every woman in a large lying-in hospital was asked 

 before her confinement whether anything had especially affected her 

 mind, and the answer was written down ; and it so happened that in no 

 instance could a coincidence be detected between the woman's answer 

 and any abnormal structure ; but when she knew the nature of the 

 structure she frequently suggested a fresh cause." (Animals and Plants, 

 Darwin, vol. ii., pp. 251-2.) 



