2o8 A STUDY IN HEREDITY 



groping in the dark ; a guessing about things concerning which 

 there are no data; a metaphysical speculation in regions un- 

 known ; not a scientific deduction from known fact. His specu- 

 lations, obscure in themselves, made more obscure by his 

 methods of demonstration, still more obscure by constantly 

 being amended under the influence of destructive criticism, 

 have drawn many students from the true path, and by their 

 difficulty have discouraged others. 



The actual issues involved are very simple. Either the germ- 

 cells are influenced by the other cells in particular directions — in 

 millions of particular directions — or they are not. Not a tittle of 

 evidence has been adduced to prove that they are. In other 

 words, no single instance of the transmission of an acquired 

 character has been recorded. It is true that some medical men 

 maintain that the children of old men who have suffered from 

 gout have a greater tendency to that disease than the children of 

 younger men ; but this is just one of those wild, unconfirmed 

 guesses with which medical literature unfortunately abounds. No 

 statistical proof has been advanced. Post hoc has been confused 

 with propter hoc. Men with a gouty diathesis, an inborn trait, 

 tend, under fit conditions, to develop gout ; inborn characters are 

 transmissible ; children are usually placed under much the same 

 conditions as their parents, therefore gouty men often have gouty 

 children. There is nothing to prove that the parental acquire- 

 ment, the disease as distinguished from the diathesis, in any way 

 affects the offspring. The poor Irish peasantry do not suffer from 

 gout. When they have the diathesis it remains latent. Removed 

 to richer food and easier conditions in English cities, they suffer, 

 on the average, as much as other people. There is nothing, in 

 fact, but guess-work, mere opinions unsubstantiated by close and 

 accurate observation, to show that the younger children of a gouty 

 family are more liable to gout than the elder. Mutilations are 

 sometimes instanced by medical men as affording examples of the 

 transmission of acquirements. Seeing, as they daily do, injuries 

 caused by accident, disease, and the surgeon's knife, medical men 

 should be peculiarly qualified to judge. In a million instances, 



