﻿40 Darwin, and after Darwin, 



was first raised by Weismann, such was not the case. 

 Any attentive reader of the successive editions of 

 Darwin's works may perceive that at least from the 

 year 1859 he had the question clearly before his 

 mind ; and that during the rest of his life his 

 opinion with regard to it underwent considerable 

 modifications — becoming more and more Lamarckian 

 the longer that he pondered it. But it was not till 

 1875 that the question was clearly presented to 

 the general public by the independent thought of 

 Mr. Galton, who was led to challenge the Lamarckian 

 factors in toto by way of deduction from his 

 theory of Stirp — the close resemblance of which to 

 Professor Weismann's theory of Germ-plasm has 

 been shown in my Examination of W eismannism. 

 Lastly, I was myself led to doubt the Lamarck- 

 ian factors still further back in the seventies, 

 by having found a reason for questioning the main 

 evidence which Mr. Darwin had adduced in their 

 favour. This doubt was greatly strengthened on 

 reading, in the following year, Mr. Galton's Theory 

 of Heredity just alluded to ; and thereupon I com- 

 menced a prolonged course of experiments upon the 

 subject, the general nature of which will be stated 

 in future chapters. Presumably many other persons 

 must have entertained similar misgivings touching the 

 inheritance of acquired characters long before the 

 publication of Weismann's first essay upon the subject 

 in 1883. The question as to the inheritance of 

 acquired characters was therefore certainly not first 

 raised by Weismann— although, of course, there is 

 no doubt that it was conceived by him independently, 

 and that he had the great merit of calling general 



