﻿126 Darwin, and after Darwin. 



transmitted by seed to the second generation, 

 and thus furnished Professor Buckman with the 

 material for his subsequent process of selection. 

 And the changes in question were not merely ot 

 a very definite character, but also of what may be 

 termed a very local character — affecting only par- 

 ticular tissues of the soma, and therefore expressive 

 of a high degree of representation on the part of the 

 subsequently developed seed, by which they were 

 faithfully reproduced in the next generation. 



Here is another case. M. Lesage examined the 

 tissues of a large number of plants growing both 

 near to, and remote from, the sea. He suspected 

 that the characteristic fleshiness, &c. of seaside plants 

 was due to the influence of sea-salt ; and proved that 

 such was the case by causing the characters to 

 occur in inland plants as a result of watering them 

 with salt-water. Then he adds : — 



"J'ai reussi surtout pour le Lepidium sativum cultive* en 

 1888 ; j'ai obtenu pour la meme plante des resultats plus nets 

 encore dans la culture de 1889, entreprise en semant les graines 

 re'colte'e s avec soin des pots de l'annee precedente et traitees 

 exactement de la meme facon 1 . " 



Here, it will be observed, there was no selec- 

 tion ; and therefore the increased hereditary effect 

 in the second generation must apparently be ascribed 

 to a continuance of influence exercised by somatic 

 tissues on germinal elements ; for at the time when 

 the changes were produced no seed had been formed. 

 In other words, the accumulated change, like the 

 initial change, would seem to have been exclusively 

 of somatogenetic origin ; and yet it so influenced the 



1 Rev. Gen. de Bot. torn. ii. p. 64. 



