THE GERM-PLASM THEORY 65 



great amount of attention, and have profoundly 

 influenced and are influencing the trend of scien- 

 tific thought. With Weismann's theories I propose 

 to deal in the remainder of this article. 



Weismann has been before the world as a scien- 

 tific writer for a number of years. He became 

 familiar to workers when his Studies in the Theory 

 of Descent were translated by Professor Raphael 

 Meldola and given to the public more than thirty 

 years ago. 



But it was not until the remarkable series of 

 essays, subsequently translated and brought out 

 in a volume by the Clarendon Press, under the 

 editorship of Professor Poulton, began to appear, 

 that he attracted that amount of attention which 

 has since been his lot. One need only mention his 

 remarkable work, The Germ-Plasm, published in 

 its English dress by Walter Scott, to remind our- 

 selves that the views put forward in the volumes 

 with which we are now dealing are not there 

 enunciated for the first time. But these two great 

 volumes contain the summing-up of his life-work, 

 the pith and marrow of all the books which have 

 preceded them. 



No one who carefully reads the chapter " On 

 the Mechanical Conception of Nature " in the 

 Studies in the Theory of Descent would imagine that 

 Professor Weismann belonged to the category of 

 blank materialists. He himself says (vol. ii., p. 712) 



" The consciousness that behind that mechanism 

 of the universe, which is alone comprehensible to 

 us, there still lies an incomprehensible teleological 



