Apparent Instances and Objections 161 



disembarked for the first time upon uninhabited islands 

 the animals have not often any fear of them, but after a 

 very few generations the fear of man has become an 

 inborn instinct. 



Weismann and his followers could object here also that 

 this fear of man is not even now an inborn character, but 

 rather is simply acquired after birth and due to the educa- 

 tion, in the largest sense, which the little animals con- 

 tinually receive from their parents and from all the other 

 adults merely by observation and imitation of their con- 

 duct on definite occasions. 



"The co-ordination, arrangement, and connections of 

 the ganglion cells which innervate the muscles of speech," 

 says Roux, "are already inborn in us to such an extent 

 that we learn to speak our mother language easiest, while 

 for example Europeans even when brought among the 

 Namas while still children never learn their language as 

 perfectly as the Namas themselves, or do so only with 

 the greatest difficulty." 128 



This does not prevent any one fundamentally opposed 

 to the inheritance of acquired characters from objecting 

 that the European language spoken by the parents and 

 ancestors of the child may not be the cause of these dis- 

 positions and inborn connections of the ganglion cells but 

 rather the effect ; in other words, it is not the use of this 

 or that speech which develops such and such inheritable 

 connections; but rather the presence of certain connec- 

 tions due to natural selection has produced certain 

 peculiarities in the character of the language of a given 

 human race. 



"When young hunting dogs," writes Exner, "which 



128 Roux: Der Kampf der Teile im Organismus. P. 38. 



