328 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 
of a particular somatic modification. If a local poisoning had a 
structural effect on some particular organ, and if that structural effect 
was reproduced in any degree in the offspring, the case would be 
relevant; but when the whole organism is soaked in a poison the case 
isirrelevant. If it could be said that the sunshine, which brings about 
sun-burning in the skin, soaks through the organism even to its repro- 
ductive cells and specifically affects them, in a manner analogous to 
the saturating poison, we should have a physiological basis for expect- 
ing the inheritance of sun-burning. But we cannot make this assump- 
tion. We have no warrant for believing that the modification of a 
part re-echoes in a definite specific way through the organism until 
even the penetralia of the germ-cells reverberate. 
2. A parent organism is poisoned, and there are structural results 
of that poisoning. The offspring are born poisoned, and show similar 
structural peculiarities. This may be due to the fact that the germ- 
cells were poisoned along with the parental body; but it may also be 
due, in the case of a mother, to a poisoning of the embryo before birth, 
in a manner comparable to a pre-natal infection. 
3. In some cases—e.g., of alcoholism in successive generations— 
there may be poisoning of the germ-cells along with the body, there 
may be poisoning of the embryo before birth, and of the infant after; 
but it may also be that what is really inherited is a specific degeneracy 
of nature, an innate deficiency of control, perhaps, which led the parent 
to alcoholism, and which may find the same or some other expression 
in the child. 
Cases are known in which the children of a dipsomaniac father and 
a quite normal mother have exhibited a tendency to alcoholism, 
insanity, and the like. In this case the possibility of poisoning the 
unborn child is eliminated, but there remain three possibilities of 
interpretation—that there was specific poisoning of the paternal germ- 
cells; that what was inherited was the constitutional weakness which 
expressed itself as alcoholism in the father; and that there were detri- 
mental influences in the early nutrition, environment, education— 
“nurture,” in short—of the offspring. 
But while we have admitted a good deal, we have not admitted 
the transmissibility of a particular structural modification brought 
about in the parental body as a result of the toxin. 
Misunderstanding VIII.—Failure to distinguish between the 
possible inheritance of a particular modification and the possible inheri- 
tance of indirect results of that modification, or of changes correlated with 
