

Characters, Hereditary and Acquired. 107 



are being performed on certain parts of the nervous 

 system, but yet will never enter when operations 

 of any kind are being effected elsewhere. Moreover, 

 Westphal has produced the epilepsy without any 

 incision^ by striking the heads of the animals with 

 a hammer 1 . This latter fact, it appears to me, 

 entirely abolishes the intrinsically improbable sugges- 

 tion touching an unknown and strangely eclectic 

 microbe. However, it is but fair to state what 

 Weismann himself has made of this fact. The fol- 

 lowing is what he says : 



" It is obvious that the presence of microbes can have nothing 

 to do with such an attack, but the shock alone must have caused 

 morphological and functional changes in the centre of the pons 

 and medulla oblongata, identical with those produced by microbes 

 in the other cases. . . . Various stimuli might cause the nervous 

 centres concerned to develop the convulsive attack which, 

 together with its after-effects, we call epilepsy. In Westphal's 

 case, such a stimulus would be given by a powerful mechanical 

 shock (viz. blows on the head with a hammer) ; in Brown- 

 Sequard's experiments, by the penetration of microbes V 



But from this passage it would seem that Weismann 

 has failed to notice that in " Westphal's case," as 

 in " Brown-Sequard's experiments," the epilepsy was 

 transmitted to progeny. That epilepsy may be pro- 

 duced in guinea-pigs by a method which does not 

 involve any cutting (i.e. possibility of inoculation) 

 would no doubt tend to corroborate the suggestion 

 of microbes being concerned in its transmission when 

 it is produced by cutting, if in the former case there 

 were no such transmission. But as there is trans- 

 mission in both cases, the facts, so far as I can see, 



1 Loc. fit. 2 Essays, vol. i. p. 315. 



