74 THE LAMARCKIAN DOCTRINE 



all students of heredity and evolution, a belief in it still lingers 

 among a section of medical men mainly because the distinction 

 between ' innate ' and ' acquired ' characters is not drawn by 

 them with sufficient clearness. 1 Gout, haemophilia, syphilis, 

 mutilations, maternal impressions, and telegony are cases in point. 

 Gout is an acquirement, an injury which often results from dietetic 

 errors. It occurs most commonly amongst people who have 

 exceptional opportunities to eat and drink to excess. Some 

 people are innately more liable to contract it than others just as 

 they may be innately taller, or darker, or different in any other 

 way. Their germ-plasm is such that they develop the disease 

 more readily under the fit stimuli. There is even such a thing as 

 " poor man's gout." Their children tend, of course, to reproduce 

 the parental peculiarity when placed, as they usually are, under 

 similar conditions. All this, however, affords no support to 

 the contention that parental excess, or parental gout resulting 

 from excess, increases the liability of offspring to the disease. 

 The well-to-do offspring of poor Irish peasants have been found 



excision of the stomachs of dogs, and declare that the stomachs of the offspring 

 are, on the average, smaller than the normal. Really, I suppose most biologists 

 think these observers mistaken, because, consciously or unconsciously, they have 

 become convinced, actually on deductive grounds, that it is impossible and in- 

 credible that acquirements can be transmitted. Some distinguished supporters 

 of the Lamarckian hypothesis still exist, however (see, for example, Mr Francis 

 Darwin's Presidential Address to the British Association, 1908 ; Professor G. 

 Henslow's book, The Heredity of Acquired Characters in Plants, and Professor 

 Marcus Hartog's and Dr Mercier's articles in the Contemporary Review, September, 

 November, and December 1908). They argue very rightly from the experimental 

 evidence, insist even more rightly that the fact that we are unable to conceive 

 how acquirements can be transmitted is not proof that they are not transmitted, 

 and declare finally that they must be transmitted because (according to them) it is 

 impossible to conceive how plants and animals have evolved into adaptation 

 to their surroundings without such transmission. I have tried in vain, however, 

 (see, for example, the Contemporary Review, October 1908) to persuade them to 

 realize that it is not the transmission of acquirements, but the transmutation of 

 useful into less useful or actually injurious characters that is really the subject 

 of discussion, or to persuade them to consider the truth that, while nature furnishes 

 no clear evidence that inborn traits have replaced acquirements, she furnishes 

 evidence, perfectly clear and immensely massive, that the contrary has happened 

 on an enormous scale. 



1 " In much of the evidence on causation terms were used without fixed meaning, 

 in different senses by different witnesses, or in more than one sense by a single 

 witness. This confusion has been no less noticeable in the medical than in the 

 general evidence given on the important question of ' Heredity/ both before the 

 Commission and at other inquiries of a cognate kind ; and it seems to us to be 

 desirable that this subject, which forms an important part of physiology, should 

 be more specially emphasized than it now is in the medical curriculum." (Report 

 of the Royal Commission on the Care and Control o f the Feeble-Minded, 1908, p. 180.) 





