LUTHER BURBANK 



outset, by pointing out that this controversy, like 

 a good many others, is concerned with unessential 

 details, sometimes even with the mere juggling of 

 words, rather than with essentials. 



As to the broad final analysis of the subject in 

 its remoter bearings, all biologists are agreed. 



There is no student of the subject speaking with 

 any authority to-day, who doubts that all animal 

 and vegetable forms have been produced through 

 evolution, and it requires but the slightest consid- 

 eration of the subject to make it clear that Herbert 

 Spencer was right when he said that no one can 

 be an evolutionist who does not believe that new 

 traits somewhere and somehow acquired can be 

 transmitted. 



Otherwise there could be no change whatever 

 in any organism from generation to generation or 

 from age to age: in a word there would be no 

 evolution. 



The point in dispute, then, is not whether any 

 trait and modification of structure, due to the 

 influence of environment, is transmissible, but 

 only as to whether environmental influences that 

 affect the body only and not the germ plasm of 

 the individual are transmissible. But when we 

 reflect that the germ plasm is part and parcel of 

 the organism, it seems fairly clear that this is a 

 distinction without a real difference. 



[32] 



