September 22, 1892' 



NATURE 



505 



countenance to the Weissman school, which denies the trans- 

 mission of functionally acquired characters, but that, on the 

 contrary, they furnish the strongest refutation of the views urged 

 by Weissman and his followers. The little moths of which I 

 have been speaking, and indeed the great majority of insects — 

 all, in fact, except thetruly social species — perform their huaable 

 parts in the economy of nature without teaching or example, 

 for they are, for the most part, born orphans, and without 

 relatives having experience to communicate. The progeny of 

 each year begins its independent cycle anew. Yet every indi- 

 vidual performs more or less perfectly its allotted part, as did its 

 ancestors for generation after generation. The correct view of 

 the matter, and one which completely refutes the more common 

 idea of the fixity of instinct, is that a certain number of indi- 

 viduals are, in point of fact, constantly departing from the lines 

 of action and variation most useful to the species, and that these 

 are the individuals which fail to perpetuate their kind and be- 

 come eliminated through the general law of natural selection. 



" Whether these actions be purely unconscious and automatic 

 or more or less intelligent and conscious, does not alter the fact 

 that they are necessarily inherited. The habits and qualities 

 that have been acquired by the individuals of each generation 

 could have become fixed in no other way than through 

 heredity. Many of these acts, which older naturalists explained 

 by that evasive word "instinctive," may be the mere uncon- 

 scious outcome of organization, comparab'e to vegetative growth ; 

 but insects exhibit all degrees of intelligence in their habits and 

 actions, and they perform acts which, however voluntary and, 

 as I believe, conscious in many cases, as in that of our Yucca 

 Moth, could not be performed were the tendency not inherited. 

 Every larvas which spins or constructs a hibernaculum, or a 

 cocoon in which to undergo its transformations, exemplifies the 

 potent power of heredity in transmitting acquired peculiarities. 

 A hundred species of parasitic larvae, e.g., of the family Bra- 

 conidae, which in themselves are almost or quite indistinguish- 

 able from one another structurally, will nevertheless construct a 

 hundred distinctive cocoons — differing in form, in texture, in 

 colour and in marking— each characteristic of its own species, 

 and in many instances showing remarkable architectural pecu- 

 liarities. These are purely mechanical structures, and can have 

 little or nothing to do with the mere organization or form or 

 structure of the larva, but they illustrate in the most convincing 

 manner the fact that the tendency to construct, and the power 

 to construct, the cocooa after some definite plan, must be fixed 

 by heredity, since there is no other way of accounting for it. 

 This fact alone, which no one seems to have thought of in the 

 discussion, should be sufficient to confound the advocates of the 

 non-transmissibility of acquired characteristics. 



" Thus, to my view, modification has gone on in the past, as 

 it is going on at the present time, primarily through heredity 

 in the insect world. I recognize the physical influence of 

 environment ; I recognize the effect of the interrelation of 

 oi^anisms ; I recognize, even to a degree that few others do, 

 the psychic influence, especially in higher organisms — the power 

 of mind, will, effort, or the action of the individual as contra- 

 distinguished from the action of the environment ; I recognize 

 the influence of natural selection, properly limited ; but above 

 all. as making effective and as fixing and accumulating the 

 various modifications due to these or whatever other influences, 

 I recognize the power of heredity, without which only the first 

 of the influences mentioned can be permanently operative." 



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NO. I 195, VOL. 46] 



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