52 THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 
mind that such influence does not reach the next gen- 
eration. 
A musician may have taught his fingers to be 
nimble; may have given them speed of motion and 
precision in their action. No child of his born after 
he acquired this wonderful facility of execution is 
any more likely to be a skilled musician than a child 
born before he had ever practiced enough to be any- 
thing more than a crude performer. Science is nearly 
certain that his children are just as likely to be tal- 
ented along musical lines if he himself never had be- 
come a musician, simply because he had it in him 
to be a musician. In other words, they may inherit 
the talent which he developed, but they inherited it 
not because he developed it, but because it was in 
him to be developed. This is in accordance with the 
famous principle that there is no inheritance of ac- 
quired characters. We shall touch this question a 
little more fully in a later chapter, in speaking of the 
development of the evolution theory since Darwin’s 
time. 
If we are right in this matter, and we certainly are 
nearly right, variation must take place for the most 
part in the germ. These variations may not show 
until the animal has grown up, but they must have 
taken place among the determinants in the germ cell 
or they would not reappear in subsequent generations. 
