Correnpimdrnrr frith Chfirlt'H Darwin 173 



terrible ot" Uarwiii still somewhat olwcure*! liw view'. In8t«ad of 'Vive Piiii- 

 genesis ! ' his cry ought to have been * PangenesiH li la lanterne pour 



rainoui' (le hi Science I' fiiiltoii coiiUl not swim uhsohitcl st the current 



of ^emmulcM flowing from tlie aomutic orguuH to reuifoir i.l ^fnuiiuil celUI 

 He still thought that Darwin's insistence on the heredity of some ac<|uired 

 characters could not be the fabric of a dream'. He saw the light but authority 

 was too great : 



"We cannot now fail to lie inipresiMMl with the fallacy of FAckoninK inheritance in the amial 

 WHy, fniin parriits to oflHpriii);, iisitij; tlioM^ wdiiI.h in tli«'ir [xipnlur scnsn of viwihlc p<>nionalitie«. 

 Th*< span ot' the true lifre<iilary link conn(>c-t.s, a.s I linvc alreiuly insistt'd upon, not the |iarent 

 with the offsprinjf, liut the prinmry elenmnts of the two, «uch as they exi«tefl in the newly im- 

 preffimte<l ova, whence they wore respectively develojm*!. No valid excuw can be offeml for 

 not attt'ndiiiK to this fact, on the K<°ound of onr ignorance of the variety and prnportionat« 

 vahu'H of the primary elements; we do not inoiid matters in the least, hut we gratuitously add 

 confusion to our if^norance, hy dealing with hertnlitaiy facts on the plan of ordinary jK^ligrt^es — 

 namely, fi-om the pfmoiig of the parents to those of their offspring." (pp. 400-1.) 



No Mendoliaii ever put more strongly than Oalton thus did that somatic 

 characters are no meastue of gametic |io.ssil)ilities! Nay.Galton knew all about 

 the fact that the second generation of hybrids shows more divei-sity than the 

 first, V)ut he did not call it, and perhaps rightly did not call it, 'segregation.' 



"It is often remarked that the immediate offspring of different races resemble their parents 



equally, hut that great diversities appear in the next and tlie succeeding generations A white 



parent neces.sarily contributes white elements to the structureless stage of his offspring and a 

 black, black ; but it does not in the least follow that the contributions from a true mulatto must 

 l>e truly mulatto." (p. 402.) 



YetCJalton — and after him the whole Biometric School — have l)een accused 

 at random of asserting that all charactei-s blend ! 



' The grave danger of Pangenesis was that it could, if by a very artificial mechanisin, account 

 for so much— rightly recognised or wrongly intei-pretetl^phenomena; it therefore blocked the 

 way to a simpler theory which, po.ssibly truer to nature, could not account for the latter. 

 Hence ai-ose the controversy as to the inheritance of 'acquired characters' of later days, a slow 

 process of getting rid of wrong inteq)retation8. lastly many phenomena which r^rwin ac- 

 counts for by the diffused genunultis of pangenesis can be wjually well (les<Tilx)d by aggregated 

 germinal units in the reprfxluctivc cells. 



- Darwin even thought of the iidieritance of insanity as that of an acquired character. 

 Habits, nientnl instincts and even insjinity modified the nerve-cells and were tran.smitted to 

 the offspring by ilifferentiate<l gemmvdes (A nimnla and Plantu,.,, 1 st Edn. Vol. ii, p. 39.')). " No one 

 who liius attended to animals either in a stute of nature or domestication will doubt that many 

 special fears, tastes, etc., which nmst have In-en ac<|uire<l at a remote periixl, art- now strictly 

 inherite<l": wrote Darwin in 187."? (Nnliirf, Vol. vii, p. 281). While some instincts may have 

 been develope<l by long ages of selection, "other instincts may have arisen suddeidy in an indi- 

 vidual and then Ijeen transmitted to its offspring independently IxJth of selection and ser\ice- 

 able experience though subsequently strengtheneil by liabit."' Darwin then cites the case of 

 Huggii\s' dog ' Kepler,' but it seems to me that there wa.s far too little known of the ancestry 

 of 'Kepler' in «// lines to l>a.se any evidence for the inheritance of acquired characters in a 

 certain family of dogs having an antipathy to butchei-a and their shops. 



There is not the slightest doubt that 20 to ."50 years hence we shall hear of nervous break- 

 downs attributed to '.shell-shockwl' fathei-s of the Great War, and proliably .spoken of hh 

 instances of the inheritance of acquirefl characters. In\  of the family history of oases of 



'shell-shock ' ttliows, however, that the bulk of these cjisf^ iiat<"d with mentally anomaloas 



stocks. 



