498 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL 



Till quite recently the answer to this question would 

 have been an unhesitating affirmative. Education, it 

 would have been said, is such an agency; and although 

 hitherto it has done comparatively little, owing to the 

 very partial and extremely unscientific way in which it 

 has been applied, we have now acquired such a sound 

 knowledge of its philosophy and have so greatly improved 

 its methods, that it has become a power by which human 

 nature may be indefinitely modified and improved. When 

 every child is really well educated, when its moral as well 

 as its intellectual faculties are trained and developed, 

 some portion of the improvement effected in each gen- 

 eration will be transmitted to the next, and thus a 

 continual advance both in the intellectual and moral 

 nature will be brought about. 



Almost all who have discussed the subject have held 

 that this is the true and only method of improving 

 human nature, because they believe that in the analogous 

 case of the bodily structure the modification and improve- 

 ment of all organisms has been effected by a similar 

 process. Lamarck taught that the effects produced by 

 use and exertion on the body of the individual animal 

 were, wholly or in part, transmitted to the offspring ; and 

 although Darwin's theory of natural selection rendered 

 this agency almost if not altogether unnecessary, yet it 

 was so universally held to be a fact of nature that Darwin 

 himself adopted it as playing a subsidiary but not unim- 

 portant part in the modification of species. So little 

 doubt had he of this "transmission of acquired characters " 

 that his celebrated theory of Pangenesis was framed so as 

 to account for it. In order to explain, hypothetically, how 

 it was that the increased size or strength given to a 

 limb or an organ by constant exercise was transmitted 

 to the progeny, he supposed that the male and female 

 germ-cells were formed by the aggregation of inconceivably 

 minute gemmules from every tissue and cell of every part 

 of the body, that these gemmules were continually 

 renewed and continually flowing towards the reproductive 

 organs, and that they had the property of developing into 

 cells and structures in the offspring which more or less 



