Apparent Instances and Objections 161 
disembarked for the first time upon uninhabited islands 
the animals have not often any fear of them, but after a 
very few generations the fear of man has become an 
inborn instinct. 
Weismann and his followers could object here also that 
this fear of man is not even now an inborn character, but 
rather is simply acquired after birth and due to the educa- 
tion, in the largest sense, which the little animals con- 
tinually receive from their parents and from all the other 
adults merely by observation and imitation of their con- 
duct on definite occasions. 
“The co-ordination, arrangement, and connections of 
the ganglion cells which innervate the muscles of speech,” 
says Roux, “are already inborn in us to such an extent 
that we learn to speak our mother language easiest, while 
for example Europeans even when brought among the 
Namas while still children never learn their language as 
perfectly as the Namas themselves, or do so only with 
the greatest difficulty.” 178 
This does not prevent any one fundamentally opposed 
to the inheritance of acquired characters from objecting 
that the European language spoken by the parents and 
ancestors of the child may not be the cause of these dis- 
positions and inborn connections of the ganglion cells but 
rather the effect; in other words, it is not the use of this 
or that speech which develops such and such inheritable 
connections; but rather the presence of certain connec- 
tions due to natural selection has produced certain 
peculiarities in the character of the language of a given 
human race. 
“When young hunting dogs,’ 
’ writes Exner, “which 
228Roux: Der Kampf der Teile im Organismus. P. 38. 
