2 24 Animal Life and Intelligence. 



with Professor Weismann, that variations may be produced 

 in the body without in any way affecting the germ. It is 

 also vitally affected if we believe that the hen does not 

 produce the egg, though she may, perhaps, modify the eggs 

 inside her ; for the modification of the hen (i.e. the variety 

 in question) may not be of the right nature or of sufficient 

 strength to impress itself upon the germinal matter of the 

 egg. We may at once admit, then, that acquired varia- 

 tions need not be inherited. 



Passing to innate variations — variations, that is to say, 

 which are the outcome of normal development from the 

 fertilized ovum — must they be inherited, at any rate, in 

 some degree ? It seems to me that they must, on the 

 hypothesis that sexual generation involves simply the 

 blending or commingling of the characters handed on in 

 the ovum or the sperm. The only cases where this would 

 apparentlif fail to hold good would be where the ovum 

 and the sperm handed on exactly opposite tendencies — 

 a variation in excess contributed by the male precisely 

 counterbalancing a variation in the opposite direction con- 

 tributed by the female parent. Even here the tendency is 

 inherited, though it is counterbalanced. On the hypothesis 

 of ** organic combination" before alluded to (p. 150), varia- 

 tions might, however, in the union of ovum and sperm, 

 be not only neutralized, but augmented. If the variation 

 be, so to speak, a definite organic compound resulting from 

 a fortunate combination of characters in ovum and sperm, 

 it might either fail altogether, or be repeated in an en- 

 feebled form, or augmented in the offspring, according as 

 the new conditions of combination were unfavourable or 

 favourable. 



Whether innate variations ever actually fail to be 

 inherited, even in an enfeebled form, it is very difficult to 

 say ; for if this, that, or the other variation fail to be thus 

 inherited, it is difficult to exclude the possibility of its 

 being an acquired variation not truly innate. Certainly 

 variations seem sometimes to appear in one generation, 

 and not to be inherited at all. And, as we have seen, Mr. 



