Essays on Life 



mutilation in many cases that Professor 

 Weismann practically admitted to have been 

 transmitted when he declared that Obersteiner 

 had verified Brown-Sequard's experiments. 



That Professor Weismann recognises the 

 vital importance to his own theory of the 

 question whether or no mutilations can be 

 transmitted under any circumstances, is evi- 

 dent from a passage on p. 425 of his work, on 

 which he says : " It can hardly be doubted 

 that mutilations are acquired characters ; they 

 do not arise from any tendency contained in 

 the germ, but are merely the reaction of the 

 body under certain external influences. They 

 are, as I have recently expressed it, purely 

 somatogenic characters viz., characters which 

 emanate from the body (soma) only, as op- 

 posed to the germ-cells ; they are, therefore, 

 characters that do not arise from the germ 

 itself. 



" If mutilations must necessarily be trans- 

 mitted" [which no one that I know of has 

 maintained], "or even if they might occa- 

 sionally be transmitted " [which cannot, I ima- 

 gine, be reasonably questioned], " a powerful 



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