Inheritance of Acquired Characters 19 



by experimental work. A theoretical rejoinder to this 

 answer may be suggested. It is like the voice in a tele- 

 phone transmitter, which starts vibrations that make 

 the receiver repeat the voice. 



Weismann's disposition of the claimed cases of the 

 inheritance of acquired characters should be considered. 

 The supposed evidence for such characters falls chiefly 

 into four categories. 



I. Mutilations. — Most of the evidence under this 

 head is in relation to animals. It must be the common 

 experience that mutilations are not inherited in man and 

 the domesticated animals. A few quotations from 

 Walter (6) suggest the situation: 



It is fortunate that the sons of warriors do not inherit their 

 fathers' honorable scars of battle, else we would now be a race of 



cripples The feet of Chinese women of certain classes 



have for centuries been mutilated into deformity by bandages 

 without the mutilation in any way becoming an inherited char- 

 acter The progressive degeneration or crippling of the 



little toe in man has been explained as the inheritance of the 

 cramping effect of shoes upon generations of shoe- wearers; but 

 WiEDERSHEiM has pointed out that Eg3Ttian miunmies show the 

 same crippling of the little toe, and no ancient Egyptian could be 

 accused of wearing shoes, or of having had shoe-wearing ancestors. 



Sheep and horses with docked tails, as- well as dogs 

 with cropped ears, never produce young having the 

 parental deformity. Weismann's experiments with 

 mice, later verified by other investigators, give addi- 

 tional evidence that mutilations are not inherited. He 

 bred mice whose tails had been cut off short at birth, and 

 continued this performance through twenty-two genera- 

 tions, with absolutely no effect on tail length. 



