TEANSLATOE'S PEEFACE 



Before I became acquainted with this work of Professor 

 Eimer, I had been for some time growing more and more 

 dissatisfied with the uncritical acceptance accorded to Pro- 

 fessor Weismann's theories of heredity and variation by 

 many English evolutionists. Even before I studied Weis- 

 mann's writings, I had become convinced that selection, 

 whether natural or artificial, could not be the essential 

 cause of the evolution of organisms. I was inclined to 

 attach more importance to the problem of the causes of 

 variation than to any of the other problems considered by 

 Darwin, and among these causes it seemed to me that the 

 most powerful were functional activity and external condi- 

 tions. I was thus led to believe that a deeper insight into 

 the phenomena of evolution would ultimately be obtained by 

 pursuing the line of inquiry suggested by Lamarck, than by 

 continually searching for new instances of adaptation to be 

 explained by the Darwinian formula. When I saw that many 

 of the ablest British biologists accepted Weismann's dogma 

 that acquired characters are not inherited, it seemed to me that 

 they were abandoning the richest vein of knowledge under a 

 mistaken guide, and I cherished the hope of finding time 

 and opportunity to add by my own researches to the evidence 



