Are Acquired Habits inherited? 299 



duckling, and that a moorhen has just these special traits 

 because it is a moorhen, one seems on natural-selection 

 principles to lay one's self open to the question: — But 

 ■what about the constant and inherent tendency to variation 

 upon which Darwin laid such stress ? The transmissionist 

 finds a source of adaptive variations in the acquired and 

 transmitted modifications of individual life. But the non- 

 transmissionist has to be content with inherent germinal 

 variations, without which progress would be impossible. 

 By natural selection these germinal variations are guided 

 into definite lines. But in these incidental traits, the 

 variations being indefinite, and the guidance of elimina- 

 tion being ex hypothesi absent, whence comes their con- 

 tinued definiteness ? 



Perhaps we may be permitted to ask the counter- 

 question. Whence comes any tendency to a definite de- 

 parture in any particular direction ? Since these variations 

 are ex liypothesi small in amount and indefinite in direction, 

 they will, through interbreeding, neutralize each other, 

 so that the stability is, so to speak, the net result of the 

 tendency to depart therefrom in all possible directions, 

 none of which is of selection value, and therefore no one 

 of which is emphasized and rendered a line of definite 

 departure. In a word, panmixia, or indiscriminate non- 

 selective mating, secures an average mean of relative 

 stability. It is best, however, honestly to confess that we 

 do not yet know everything about organic nature. 



Furthermore, we have seen — to consider the matter 

 from a slightly different standpoint — that experience in 

 one of its aspects is apparently not inherited. Association 

 links have to be forged by the individual. At sight of the 

 conspicuously marked cinnabar caterpillar there is no 

 inherited suggestion of its nasty taste. That is the out- 

 come of individual experience. Objects of all kinds, if 



