178 OUTLINES OF EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY 



Artificially or accidentally produced mutilations afford a very 

 good example of such obviously somatogenic characters, and with 

 regard to the inheritance of these Weismann's position is clearly 

 summed up in the following passage : " As far back as the 

 eighteenth century the great philosopher Kant, and in our own 

 day the anatomist Wilhelm His, gave their verdict decidedly 

 against such allegations, and absolutely denied any inheritance 

 of mutilations ; and now, after a decade or more of lively debate 

 over the pros and cons, combined with detailed anatomical 

 investigations, careful testing of individual cases, and experi- 

 ment, we are in a position to give a decided negative and say 

 there is no inheritance of mutilations." l It is, however, as 

 already pointed out, all a question of evidence, and we may here 

 quote a definite case in order to show the nature of the evidence 

 with which we have to deal : 



" A female (and very prolific) cat, when about half-grown, met 

 with an accident. ' Her fine, long tail was trodden on and had 

 a compound fracture, two vertebrae being so displaced that they 

 ever after formed a short offset between the near and far end of 

 the tail, leaving the two out of line. At first I noticed that out 

 of every litter of kittens some had a tail with a querl in it.' With 

 successive litters the deformity increased, until ' not a kitten of 

 the old cat had a straight tail, and it grew worse in her progeny 

 until now we have not a cat with a normal tail on the premises ' 

 (in a cat-population of six or eight, exclusive of young kittens). 

 ' The tails are now in part mere stumps, some have a semicircular 

 sweep sideways, and some have the original querl. Perhaps the 

 deformity was somewhat aggravated by in-and-in breeding and. 

 by artificial selection practised by my Chinaman, who, with the 

 perversity of his race, preferred the crooked tails, and thus 

 preserved them in preference to the normal kittens. There are 

 no other abnormally-tailed cats in the neighbourhood.' " 



Professor Brewer quotes this remarkable case 2 from "that 

 keen observer and eminent scientist, Professor Eugene W. 

 Hilgard of the University of California," along with others of a 

 like kind from various sources. 



It is of course essential to the stability of Weismann's theory 

 as a whole that evidence such as this should be rebutted. I am 

 not aware that he has anywhere criticized this particular case, 

 but his general remarks in somewhat similar cases may be 

 quoted with advantage in this connection : 



1 "The Evolution Theory" (London, 1904), Vol. II., p. 65. 

 . 2 Vide Cope's " Primary Factors of Organic Evolution " (Chicago, 1896). pp. 432-3. 



