THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



to pave the way for inclinations of the children 

 along the same line. The logical outcome of 

 this argument is a position which had been aimed 

 at long before Darwin by Lamarck. In the last 

 analysis, the selection in the struggle for ex- 

 istence might be entirely eliminated so far as 

 the pure intensification of hereditary tendencies 

 is concerned, and all specially adapted children 

 could be considered as the outcome of special 

 characters acquired by the parents through spe- 

 cial exercise. Apart from the fact that this 

 explanation does not explain some other things 

 and is not satisfactory to us in a good many 

 other respects, for instance, when we are called 

 upon to explain how exercise should be able to 

 heighten or change the color of brown rabbits, 

 there is one great difficulty which is not met by 

 this theory. It has been denied that characters 

 acquired by the parents through exercise could 

 ever be transmitted to offspring. If I play ball 

 for thirty years and all my muscles and nerves 

 are perfectly trained for that purpose, and if at 

 the end of that time I propagate my kind, it is 

 supposed to be impossible that a child then born 

 should be more predisposed in its bodily structure 

 for ball playing than any other child. August 

 Weisman carried this doubt to its extreme. It 



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