14 INITIATIVE IN EVOLUTION 



seemed to meditate eVil. He hastened forward just in time 

 as his two enemies sprang at him, and these two near relatives 

 were locked in mortal grip — and so he passed on safe ! 

 The reader, naturalist or layman, can point the moral for 

 himself. 



At the battle of Trafalgar, while fighting was in full pro- 

 gress on one of the ships, some sailors were occupied in throwing 

 overboard the bodies of those who had been killed. A poor 

 Scotchman badly wounded and hardly conscious was taken 

 up by two seamen, an Englishman and an Irishman, and as 

 they were about to throw him overboard his feeble voice was 

 heard to say " I'm no deed yet." " What's that ?" said the 

 Irishman. " I'm no deed yet " ; " Arrah, the doctor said 

 he was dead, over wid him," said the Irishman. 



Weismann. 



During the period 1894-1899 there was a dramatic proclama- 

 tion on the part of one of the greatest living biologists, which was, 

 in the cosmos of biology, what the Proclamation of the Empress - 

 Queen of India was in 1876, and it is not out of place to remind the 

 reader that the fates of the two Imperial utterances have been 

 somewhat different. In 1895 Weismann issued his official state- 

 ment of doctrine which was to crown the work of his life, an essay 

 on Germinal Selecti on . From Frey burg in November, 1 895, he wrote 

 a preface to his address delivered on September 16th in that year 

 to the International Congress of Zoologists at Leyden. This formed 

 an epoch in biological thought and there lived none so well qualified 

 as Weismann to stand forth as its interpreter. The well -translated, 

 forcible language, and lucid thought leave the reader in no manner 

 of doubt as to his meaning. It took a wider form in his final book 

 on the Evolution Theory, but the germinal and essential thoughts 

 of the latter were contained in the former. From 1895 onwards 

 the praise of Weismann was in all the churches. Probably no 

 modern worker in the fields of heredity and evolution has done 

 so much as Weismann towards raising great issues and removing 

 some ancient misconceptions ; but it is one thing to raise great 

 issues and another to solve them. In this he has signally failed, 

 nevertheless biological theory would be the poorer if he had not 

 made the attempt. Reflection, the work of other biologists, and 

 the remorseless hand of time have shaken the edifices then raised. 

 I will here only bring forward a few of the most illuminating passages 

 of the 1895 essay, and then refer to the handling of Weismann 's 

 work by Romanes. 



