TRANSMISSION OF MODIFICATIONS 357 



much or little, or not at all ; the discussion is there largely an 

 academic question. But in the fields and yards of the farmer it 

 is the largest of all questions, and we are led to inquire sharply 

 whether these distinctions are real ; whether the differences 

 between germinal (blastogenic) and acquired (somatogenic) char- 

 acters are differences in kind or in degree ; whether, in short, 

 acquired characters, in the common acceptation of the term and 

 in any true sense, exist at all. 



The characters of the individual are the characters of the race. 

 Careful observation will disclose the fact that every quality 

 inherited or acquired by an adult individual is possessed in some 

 degree by every other normal adult individual of the same race. 

 All horses can trot some ; all cows give some milk ; all sheep 

 bear wool of some color, length, or degree of fineness ; all hens 

 have feathers ; all men not idiotic can learn and speak a lan- 

 guage; all men have some little (perhaps very little) musical 

 ability, and all can learn to play the piano or the violin. The 

 point here is not whether it is skillfully done, but whether it 

 can be done at all. 



It is a habit of speech to designate a low degree of quality by 

 negative terms, and we say of the horse that trots but slowly or 

 awkwardly that he " cannot trot." We mean by that that he 

 cannot trot well enough to make him valuable for this purpose. 

 In the same way the man who " cannot sing" is the one whose 

 singing we do not care to hear; the man who " cannot speak" 

 is the one on whom we would not depend for the presentation 

 of a difficult case. We do not mean of him that, like the oyster, 

 he cannot convey information and is dumb because of the utter 

 absence of the organs and powers of speech. 



So these are relative terms, like ."heat" and " cold," but our 

 use of them in the absolute sense has built up in the popular 

 mind an assumption that they stand for realities, not relative 

 values of the same thing ; just as the unlearned man supposes 

 cold to be as real as heat, and black (which is the absence of all 

 color) to be as real as white (which is the presence of all). Thus 

 have we by our verbiage elevated relative values to absolute 

 distinctions in kind, creating misconceptions which we must first 

 undo if we are to proceed safely in this study. All individuals 



