1 6 THE CHARACTERS OF LIVING BEINGS 



maintain that ' inborn ' characters are * germinal ' and tend to be 

 transmitted to offspring, most of them insist that ' acquirements ' 

 are not germinal and are never inherited. If we consider these 

 words carefully it becomes clear that by an innate or inborn 

 character they imply one which has developed under the stimulus of 

 nutriment^ whereas by an acquirement they imply one which has 

 developed under the stimulus of use or injury ; when they speak of an 

 innate character as inherited they imply that in the parent and child 

 alike it developed under the stimulus of nutriment ; and when, as is 

 still sometimes the case, they allege the inheritance of a parental 

 acquirement, they imply that a character which was developed 

 under the influence of use or injury in the parent, is, in the child, 

 TRANSFERRED to a different category and developed under the 

 stimulus of nutriment. 



31. But now, bearing in mind the foregoing paragraphs bearing 

 in mind that all evolution consists in a germinal change, that a 

 germinal change consists in an altered potentiality to produce 

 characters, that obviously no characters can arise unless the poten- 

 tiality to develop them is present in the germ-plasm and unless it 

 is awakened by fitting stimuli, that all characters which are poten- 

 tially present arise with equal certainty if fitting stimuli be applied, 

 that all growth is a modification of pre-existing characters, that no 

 characters are derived from similar characters in the parent (e.g. 

 the child's hand from the parent's hand) but all take origin in the 

 fertilized ovum, bearing in mind also that the evolution of the higher 

 animals has consisted mainly in the evolution of a power of develop- 

 ing * acquirements ' under the stimulus of use, and that the mass 

 of characters developed under this stimulus is quite as essential a 

 part of that ' normal ' development whereby the maturity of the 

 individual is attained and his survival secured as the characters 

 developed under the stimulus of nutriment bearing in mind all 

 this, let the reader ask himself in what respects characters that 

 develop in response to the stimulus of nutriment are more 

 germinal, inborn, and hereditary than those which arise in response 

 to other stimuli. I believe he will be forced to conclude that 

 these expressions are erroneous in that they altogether fail to 

 indicate, in that they obscure rather than reveal, the true distinc- 

 tions between classes of characters. They have come into use 

 only because biologists, though speaking constantly of germinal 

 characters, have as constantly thought in terms, not of the germ- 

 plasm, but of the individual. Manifestly no characters are really 

 more germinal, inborn, or inheritable than any others. All are 



