Heredity, Variation and Genius 29 



for attack and defence as a less cumbrous and 

 straighter horn might have been. Does nature 

 which manifestly makes such seeming prodigal 

 waste of material and so many seeming failures 

 in its process of evolution, after all, work entirely 

 on utilitarian lines ? Or is it perchance that man 

 just creates the purposes he finds in things, 

 as he himself creates the world in which he finds 

 them ? However that be, in no case was it meant 

 that the acquired character was actually trans- 

 mitted as such to the immediate descendant. The 

 character necessarily dies with the parent's body ; 

 nor could the microscopic germ contain in its 

 minute self the exact structural equivalent of its 

 parent's acquisition. Lamarck surely never 

 imagined that the particular offspring inherited 

 more than a predisposition to its parent's special 

 exercise of function and sequent growth of struc- 

 ture. The real question is whether ancestral 

 practice ever produces the smallest imaginable 

 modification of the germ in the acquired direction, 

 initiating an inclination of character which grows 

 by adaptation and gradual accumulation of incre- 

 ments through the ages ; whether in fact the 

 germ inherits a special tendency, declaring itself 

 in feeling as a want, to the formation of a similar 

 character and, thus inheriting, develops it further 

 than the parent in similarly adapted surroundings 

 by virtue of the innate gift and intrinsic impulse. 

 Does it perchance thus possess in invested capital 

 something of that which its parent laboriously 

 acquired ? 



