96 REMARKS ON CERTAIN [XI. 



quired (somatogenic) characters, Professor Vines finds himself 

 opposed to me ; for he regards such inheritance as possible. 

 I have denied this because it did not appear to me self-evident, 

 as had been previously assumed by every one, but rather utterly 

 unproven ; and because I believe that completely unproved as- 

 sumptions of such importance should not be made, when they 

 need such a number of improbable hypotheses to make them 

 intelligible. I have tested, as accurately as possible, all the 

 available evidence for such inheritance and have found that 

 they possess no value as proofs. There is no inheritance of 

 mutilations, and, up to the present time, these form 'the only 

 real basis for the assumption of the hereditary transmission of 

 somatogenic variations. If, in my last essay ', I did not directly 

 deny all possibility of such inheritance. Professor Vines should 

 interpret that in my favour and not to my discredit : it is not the 

 business of an investigator to maintain that a proposition, which 

 he sets forth in accordance with the present state of our know- 

 ledge, must be accepted as an infallible dogma. Professor 

 Vines finds the ' statements of opinion so fluctuating that it is 

 difficult to determine what his position exactly is,' but he could 

 have easil}^ arrived at my views, if he had judged them by the 

 last essay, instead of promiscuously contrasting isolated pas- 

 sages from eight essays, which occupied eight years in their 

 production. The last essay is especially concerned with 'the 

 supposed transmission of mutilations,' and, at the end of it, my 

 verdict on the state of the problem of the inheritance of ac- 

 quired (somatogenic) characters, is set forth as follows, 'The 

 true decision as to the Lamarckian principle [lies in] the ex- 

 planation of the observed phenomena of transformation. If, 

 as I believe, these phenomena can be explained without the 

 Lamarckian principle, we have no right to assume a form of 

 transmission of which we cannot prove the existence. Only if 

 it could be shown that we cannot now or ever dispense with 

 the principle should we be justified in accepting it V 



The distinguished botanist, De Vries, has shown that certain 

 constituents of the cell-body, for example the chromatophores 

 of Algse, pass directly from the germ-cell of the mother into the 

 daughter organism, whilst, as a rule, the male germ-cell contains 

 no chromatophores. This appears to be a possible case of the 

 ^ See Vol. I, p. 431. "^ See Vol. I, p. 461. 



