THE INTIKRTTANCR OF ACQUIKEMKNTS HI 



maternal impressions and telegony may conveniently 

 be bracketed together in the reader's mind as entirely 

 supposititious phenomena which have been quoted in 

 favour of the transmission of acquirements. " Tele- 

 gony is the name given to tlic supposed fact that 

 offspring of a mother to one sire may inherit charac- 

 ters from a sire with which the mother had previously 

 bred" (Chalmers Mitchell). For instance, it has been 

 said that a mare which had born a foal to a (juagga 

 subsequently bore striped offspring to a thoroughbred 

 horse. But, as Archdall Reid points out, " If the 

 white mother of a half-breed bear dark children to 

 a white father, she would not transmit anything she 

 acquired, for intercourse with a negro does not make 

 her dark." In any case, it has been conclusively 

 proved, mainly by the work of Cossar Ewart, that 

 telegony does not occur. 



Thus it appears that, though the transmission of 

 certain acquirements is not incompatible with the 

 theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm, yet the 

 scope of such transmission must be relatively small, 

 if the theory be true. Darwin's theory of pangenesis, 

 as we have seen, assumes the transnn'ssion of acquire- 

 ments, but that theory is no longer held by any one, 

 and its repudiation is a blow to the belief in the 

 transmission of acquirements. Darwin hiin.solf be- 

 lieved in such transmission, but the neo-Darwinians 

 or Weismannians repudiate it almost without reser- 

 vation, and with it Darwin's theory of pangenesis. 

 With Hertwig's theory of heredity the transmission 

 of acquirements is quite compatible. 



Lamarck's belief in the transmission of acquire- 



F 



