THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 15 



in response to individual experience, or what may be called " educa- 

 bility," is the quality which characterises the larger cerebrum, and 

 is that which has led to its selection, survival, and further increase 

 in volume '...'" Educability " can be transmitted ; it is a 

 congenital character. But the results of education can not be 

 transmitted. In each generation they have to be acquired 

 afresh. . . . On the other hand, the nerve-mechanisms of instinct 

 are transmitted, and owe their inferiority as compared with the 

 results of education to the very fact that they are not acquired 

 by the individual in relation to his particular needs, but have 

 arisen by selection of congenital variation in a long series of 

 preceding generations.' ^* 



Lankester was led by these conclusions to reject altogether the 

 theory of G. H. Lewes, G. Romanes, and others, * that instincts are 

 due to lapsed intelligence,' a theory also disproved by Lloyd Morgan's 

 observations on young birds described by him at the Ipswich meeting 

 in 1895.^^ Another very important subject brought forward by 

 Lankester was the evidence, originally published by him in 1894, '^^ 

 that Lamarck's first and second laws of heredity ' are contradictory 

 the one of the other, and therefore may be dismissed.' His state- 

 ment may be briefly summarised as follows : 



The first law assumes that in spite of thousands of generations 

 during which a normal environment has ' moulded the individuals 

 of a given species of organism, and determined as each indi- 

 vidual developed and grew " responsive " quantities in its parts 

 (characters) ; yet, as Lamarck tells us, and as we know, there is in 

 every individual born a potentiality which has not been extinguished. 

 Change the normal conditions . . . and (as Lamarck bids us observe), 

 in spite of all the long-continued response to the earlier normal 

 specific conditions, the innate congenital potentiality shows itself. 

 The individual . . . shows new responsive quantities in those parts 

 of its structure concerned, new or acquired characters.' 



' So far, so good. What Lamarck next asks us to accept, as his 

 " second law," seems not only to lack the support of experimental 

 proof, but to be inconsistent with what had just preceded it. The 

 new character which is ex hypothesi, as was the old character . . . 

 which it has replaced — a response to environment . . .is, according 

 to Lamarck, all of a sudden raised to extraordinary powers. The 

 new or freshly acquired character is declared ... to be capable of 

 transmission by generation ; that is to say, it alters the potential 

 character of the species. It is no longer a merely responsive 



1* Report, British Association, 1906, pp. 26-27. The conclusions here quoted had 

 been communicated to Sociiti de Biologie of Paris, in 1899 (Jubilee Volume) and 

 were reprinted in Nature, vol. Ixi, 1900, pp. 624-625. 



^* Report, British Association, p. 734. 



i« Nature, vol. li, 1894, p. 127 ; Report, British Association, 1906, pp. 29, 30. 



