D.—ZOOLOGY. 15 
Coming now to the meetings of the British Association and of this 
Section in the second half-century, we are naturally led to the discussion, 
‘Are Acquired Characters Hereditary,’ at Manchester in 1887, when 
Weismann, Ray Lankester, Hubrecht and many others spoke; and to 
the same subject at Newcastle in 1889 when Francis Galton and Fairfield 
Osborn, our welcome guest to-day, took part in the debate. 
It was only natural that Weismann’s conclusions should rouse intense 
opposition, for they undermined the foundations on which so much 
evolutionary theory had been erected. I remember Sir William Turner’s 
words at one of our meetings about this time— Whoever believes that 
acquired characters are not transmitted looks upon life with a single eye’ 
—not in the Biblical sense, but implying monocular vision ; also Lawson 
Tait’s dogmatic statement, at a meeting of the Midland Institute at 
Oxford in 1890, that a believer in Weismann’s conclusion ‘ says that the 
sun shines black.’ One result of the new doctrine—the collapse of Herbert 
Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy, so largely built upon Lamarckian 
principles, was especially distressing to those who remembered a beneficent 
power in teaching the world to think ; remembered, too, what it had done 
for themselves in earlier years. But not all naturalists were startled 
and amazed when Weismann ‘ awoke us from our dogmatic sleep.’ I well 
remember Ray Lankester’s reply when I first mentioned the subject to 
him—‘ I believe Weismann is right. I have always doubted the statement 
that acquired characters are transmitted.’ And his two old Oxford friends, 
H. N. Moseley and Thiselton-Dyer, were also ready to follow Weismann 
from the first. Two saymgs of Weismann may be recalled here—how the 
“Continuity of the Germplasm,’ the theory which first led him to doubt 
the accepted views on heredity, came to him when he discovered that 
“there was something which had to be carefully preserved’ throughout 
the development of a Hydrozoon, viz., that unexpended portion of the 
parental germ-cell which will give rise to the germ-cells of the offspring. 
Shielded and ‘carefully preserved’ as was this carrier of hereditary 
qualities, how improbable was the conclusion that it would be effected by 
the happenings in distant parts of the organism, how doubly improbable 
the supposition that the effect would reproduce the result of these happenings 
in the offspring. All this is, of course, well known, but it is interesting 
to recall it as told by Weismann himself. His other remark was to the 
effect that if acquired characters could be transmitted, we should not be 
obliged to search for the evidence. It would have been obvious everywhere. 
Although, as my friend and colleague, Prof. Goodrich, has written— 
“these conclusions of Weismann... are the most important con- 
tribution to the science of evolution since the publication of Darwin’s 
Origin of Species,’ * it was soon realised that the statement of the problem 
required revision and that Weismann’s terms ‘ Blastogenic ’ and “Somato- 
genic ’ were inaccurate ; for the germinal or inherent characters are no 
less dependent on external causes than the somatic or acquired characters. 
This criticism was developed by Adam Sedgwick in his address to this 
Section at Dover in 1899 and by Goodrich at Edinburgh in 1921; also, 
between these two addresses, by Archdall Reid. Furthermore, in the 
spring of 1890, when I was giving a course of University Extension 
8 Living Organisms, Oxford, 1924, pp. 50, 51. 
