ON THE QUICK GROWING WALNUT 
able period. In the last analysis, people are able 
to put two and two together and discover that the 
result is four. And in the course of time even the 
most illogical biologists were forced to see the 
elemental truth of the proposition that new char- 
acters acquired by an individual organism must be 
transmissible, else there could be no such cumu- 
lative change as that which results in the trans- 
formation of a species in new adaptations to its 
surroundings. 
In other words, if acquired characters are not 
transmitted, there can be no organic evolution. 
But a good many of the former adherents of 
this paradoxical view have abandoned their illog- 
ical position unwillingly, and even now are only 
willing to admit that such acquired characters are 
transmissible as are imprinted first on the germ 
plasm, and not on the body of the parent organism. 
The contention really réduces the entire matter 
to a question of definition. It is virtually a dis- 
tinction without a difference, when we reflect that, 
at all events, in the case of the plants, germ plasm 
and body plasm are everywhere associated, so that 
we must suppose that if there is really a distinction 
between the two, it is a distinction within the sub- 
stance of the individual cell, as the plant body 
contains both body plasm and germ plasm. Our 
earlier studies have shown that we are forced to 
[215] 
