liOTANlC.VL SUBJECTS. 259 



parents, but of grandparents, of great grandparents, and so on, 

 ad infinitum. 



We might look upon inheritance as a struggle for mastery 

 between the germs of the immediate parents and the chain of more 

 distant parents at the back of each, the progeny being the outcome 

 of this struggle. 



In an ovarv containino; thousands of seed-buds, such as the 

 ixjppy-head, we ma}- possil)ly get a mixture of different inheri- 

 tances, viz., parthenogenetic bucb-:, inheriting the features of the 

 mother onlv ; buds containing a preponderance of the father's 

 features ; buds inheriting a blending of both parents' features ; 

 and buds containing various proportions of ancestral features. 



With respect to ova, I iiud a curious statement in " Natural 

 Inheritance," by Sir Douglas Galtou, p. 15. In discussing the 

 improbability of acquired habits becoming inherited by the unborn 

 child, he says : — " ^loreover, it must be recollected that the con- 

 nexion between the unborn child and the mother is hardly more 

 intimate than that between some parasites and the animals on which 

 thev live. Xot a single nerve has been traced between them, not 

 a drop of blood has been found to pass from the mother to the 

 child."* 



Admitting that the foetus, when in the womb, is like n foreign 

 body, how about the ovum, which was budded off by the mother's 

 ovary ? One woukl wish to know, moreover, how the foetus 

 grows, if it takes nothing from the mother ? Is it one of those 

 nondescript bodies that can produce something out of nothing ? 

 But Galton goes on to sav that the foetus " obtains its air and 

 nourishment from the mother jjurely through soakage." And is 

 this not enough, considering that with this soakage multitudes of 

 micro-organisms may pa.ss from one to the other ? 



I think all this strange reasoning comes from Weismann's 

 having propounded the idea that protophyta and protozoa are 

 influenced by surroundings, while these same protoph}-ta and 

 protozoa are not influenced by surroundings when they are 

 embedded in their soma. It would be .strange if this were so, 

 considering that electrical influence can pass through the whole 



* There still appears to linger in the minds of biologists a sort of super- 

 stition that ner\'es and blood are a sine qua non for the transmission of 

 influences. 



R 2 



