40 EVOLUTION 



to it. Now, theories of heredity apart, and kaving 

 aside th,e results of minute observations which had 

 not been made in Lamarck's time, the natural supposi- 

 tion undoubtedly is that acquired characters are 

 inherited just as much as any others. Given the ob- 

 served fact that offspring resemble their parents more 

 closely than they do other members of the same species, 

 it is natural to believe that the child will take after 

 the forms exhibited by its parents at the time of its 

 conception rather than after those shown by them at 

 any previous period of their lives. This seems to be 

 the natural view in the absence of any other evidence 

 for or against, and so accurate a thinker as Herbert 

 Spencer, writing before the publication of the ' Origin 

 of Species,' regarded the term inheritance as neces- 

 sarily implying inheritance of this particular kind. 

 For this reason it has sometimes been thought that 

 Darwin scarcely accorded to Lamarck the appreciation 

 which he deserved ; and yet Darwin himself fell back 

 upon the Lamarckian explanation on the few occasions 

 when natural selection seemed to have failed him. 



When, however, we come to know more of the actual 

 facts of sexual generation, we find that it is very 

 difficult, if not impossible, to imagine any kind of 

 mechanism by which this supposed transmission of 

 acquired modifications can take place. We shall defer 

 the further discussion of this subject, as well as the 

 question of the existence of direct and other evidence 

 of use inherit ance, until the latter half of the next 

 chapter, where we shall refer briefly to the contro- 



