538 The American Naturalist. [July, 
with a number of friends abroad, to learn the present state of 
opinion. The two leading English and French authorities 
upon this subject express themselves doubtfully. 
Galton’s mind is still wavering, as in his work of 1889:! 
“Iam unprepared to say more than a few words on the obscure, 
unsettled and much discussed subject of the possibility of 
transmitting acquired faculties. . . . There is very little 
direct evidence of its influence in the course of a single gener- 
ation, if the phrase of Acquired Faculties is used in perfect 
strictness and all inheritance is excluded that could be referred 
to some form of Natural Selection, or of Infection before birth, 
or of peculiarities of Nurture and Rearing.” 
Ribot, although in the center of the French Lamarckians, 
gays: “Notwithstanding these facts the transmission of 
acquired modifications appears to be very limited, even when 
occurring in both of the parents.” 
Excepting from Kölliker; His, the Leipzig anatomist ; 
Pflüger, the physiologist; Ziegler, in pathology ; and De Vries, 
in botany, Weismann has not found much sympathy from his 
own countrymen in his opinion “that acquired characters 
cannot be transmitted; . . . that there are no proofs of 
such transmission, that its occurrence is theoretically improb- 
able, and that we must attempt to explain the transformation 
of species without its aid.”? Besides Virchow? and Eimer,‘ 
Haeckel has expressed himself strongly against Weismann. 
My colleague, Professor Wilson, writes me (Munich, Decem- 
ber 31, 1891) that, while Weismann’s modified theories as to 
the phenomena in the productive cells are pretty generally 
accepted, Hertwig, Hofer, Paully, Boveri, and others are pro- 
nounced advocates of the acquired-character-transmission 
theory. 
In Paris, Brown-Séquard, who was among the first to test 
this problem experimentally by observing the inheritance of 
the effects of nerve-lesions; his assistant Dupuy, Giard, Duval, 
‘Natural Inheritance, 1889, p. 14. 
*Biologisches Centralblatt, 1888, pp. 65 and 97. 
3Ueber den Transformi » Archiv. f. Anthropologie, 1889, p. 1. 
‘Organic Evolution, upon the Law of Inheritance of Acquired Characters. 
Tiibingen, 1888. Trans. 
