194 Inheritance of Acquired Characters 
must nevertheless in many cases be so inconsiderable 
in amount, that they could not possibly constitute such 
an advantage as to give natural selection anything to act 
on. But Weismann in order to extricate himself from 
this embarassment needs only to repeat here again his 
habitual, axiomatic, already mentioned reply that we 
are unable to measure the degree of selective power of 
the struggle for existence. 
Others object that certain characters due to functional 
adaptation are altogether useless to the species. One 
can conceive how they might be inborn in individuals 
if one admits the inheritance of acquired characters, 
whereas they would be quite inexplicable if one sought 
to ascribe them to natural selection alone. But Weis- 
mann has always the answer at hand that one cannot 
judge of their present or past usefulness. A _ typical 
example of these discussions which logical processes are 
powerless to decide is the question debated in the Spencer- 
Weismann polemic upon the especially acute taste sense 
of the tongue papillae. While Spencer attributes it to 
the continual rubbing of the tongue against the teeth 
and states that it is without utility for the organism; 
Weismann on the contrary asserts that it may have been 
of some use, at least in the past. We do not forget in 
this connection that the question might also be raised 
whether this fine sense of taste is really inborn or is 
not rather acquired anew in each individual after birth. 
Others regard natural selection as powerless to bring 
about any transformation because the fortuitous vari- 
ations or individual deviations, upon which it is able to 
act, are constantly destroyed by amphimixis. Weismann 
can always reply that the fortuitous variations or devi- 
ations preserved in an individual by natural selection are 
