OPENING ADDRESS. 9 
variety, as we whites modestly call ourselves, is not so liable to be swamped by 
numbers as some have thought.” 
Here we have a perfect fulfilment of what I last year, in 
ignorance of this observation of Livingstone’s, predicted 
as being likely to occur in such a case. We have the 
whitish aristocracy in a dominant condition, and evidently 
in a fair way to spread their characteristics over a larger 
area and give rise to a marked variety, and it had clearly 
struck Livingstone fourteen years before the theory of 
physiological selection had been heard of, just as it must 
strike us now, as an instance telling strongly against the 
““swamping”’ argument as used by Fleeming Jenkin and 
Romanes. 
TRANSMISSION OF ACQUIRED CHARACTERS. 
At the meeting of the British Association held at New- 
castle last month, two important discussions took place 
in Section D (Biology) upon subjects connected with 
Evolution which, although they did not lead to any 
definite conclusions at the time, must have done good in 
allowing the views of various schools of evolutionists to be 
thoroughly ventilated. The first of these discussions was 
upon the vexed question of acquired characters—Can a 
character acquired as the result of external influences 
during the lifetime of one generation be transmitted by 
heredity to the next generation ? 
Nearly all evolutionists hold by some form of the 
Weismannian theory of heredity, and according to Weis- 
mann it is theoretically impossible for an acquired (or 
““somatogenic’’) character to be inherited,* because the 
* “Fence it follows that the transmission of acquired characters is an 
impossibility, for if the germ plasm is not formed anew in each individual but 
is derived from that which preceded it, its structure, and above all its molecular 
constitution, cannot depend upon the individual in which it happens to occur, 
