THE METHOD OF EVOLUTION 21 



with ears and nose ready pierced. For how many 

 generations have we amputated the tails of terriers, 

 and yet their tails are no shorter. Moreover, were 

 such instances of hare-lips and crooked fingers as 

 I have just indicated real cases of transmission, and 

 not of coincidence, we must still remember that one 

 swallow does not make a summer ; such instances 

 would be too far and few between to influence the 

 problem we have under discussion — to influence the 

 course of evolution. In judging of this question we 

 must not think, as is the popular habit, of rare and 

 isolated cases, which, with practical certainty, may 

 be attributed to coincidence, but only to what 

 ordinarily happens. It will then be perceived how 

 overwhelming is the case against the doctrine of 

 the transmission of acquirements. 



The general question of the transmission of 

 acquirements is too big and too abstruse to be 



transmission of acquirements would not have been proved ; for by the 

 transmission of acquirements we mean, or ought to mean, that the 

 precise thing the parent acquired, or something Hke it, is transmitted 

 to offspring. But a mother who gets a mental impression does not 

 transmit that mental impression to her child ; on the contrary, the 

 child is supposed to develop something quite different, a physical 

 malformation. So, also, did the white mother of a half-breed bear 

 dark children to a white father, she would not transmit anything she 

 acquired, for intercourse with a negro does not make her dark. 

 Telegony and the transmission of maternal impressions therefore 

 cannot furnish arguments for the Lamarckian doctrine. Were they 

 true, they would merely furnish arguments for the very reasonable 

 doctrine that changes in the parental mind or body may, in this or 

 that other way, affect children subsequently born — a very different 

 thing from the doctrine of the transmission of acquired characters. 



