WEISMANN AS INTERPRETED 135 



and satisfactory examples of the transmission of mutilations have 

 been brought forward. We can realize that the loss of an arm, 

 for example, has no direct influence upon the germ cells of the 

 individual, and that so these germ cells if fertilized will develop 

 into the complete individual. But there is another class of 

 phenomena specially interesting our profession which appears to 

 give a direct lie to Weismann's thesis. And it is, I think, this 

 failure of the ruling theory to explain satisfactorily the pheno- 

 mena in question which has been the main factor in making us 

 as a profession not enthusiastic of late years to debate the 

 subject. 



For, accepting the theory, we must be prepared to deny 

 wholesale the transmission of acquired defects of every order 

 and give ourselves over to a most serious form of fatalism. 



If an individual is from the first feeble-minded, that is not 

 his parents' fault ; it is due either to an unfortunate commingling 

 of the ids, or ancestral plasms, composing the promiscuous 

 ovum and spermatozoon from which he is derived, or to characters 

 which have come down to him from previous generations. If 

 he, being diseased, begets feeble-minded children, he is in no- 

 wise to blame acquired characters are not transmitted. Either 

 those feeble-minded children are an accident a spontaneous 

 variation ; or more probably they represent the summation of 

 characters inherited from long generations. If a man or a 

 woman becomes an alcoholic, it is not his or her fault, it is the 

 result of inherited tendencies ; and if the children of the same 

 are of weak constitution or idiotic, again the parents are blame- 

 less : characters acquired by the parents are not transmitted, 

 the characters of the parents must have descended to them. 

 If a man is a criminal, again he is not to blame ; criminality 

 is atavism, is a -reversion to an earlier state, is an inheritance 

 of characters or features peculiar to primaeval man. We are, 

 so the popular translation of Weismann's theory goes, the de- 

 scendants of criminals, or at least at a certain stage our ancestors 

 were of an imperfect and criminal type. And if criminality 

 appears in the family, with imperfect formation of head and 

 brain and low mental state, that is due to the fact that by the 

 fortuitous extrusion of certain ids from ovum or spermatozoon, 

 the ids of the criminal ancestors have preponderated in the 

 fertilized cell, and the result has been that the individual has 



