34 The American Naturalist. [January, 
RECENT LITERATURE. 
Packard, on the Inheritance of Acquired Characters.'— 
The time has not yet come for deciding the question which is the nearer 
right, the neo-Lamarckian or the neo-Darwinian school. Both have 
their arguments to advance and both find facts not easily to be ex- 
plained by theories of the other. Yet, to us, it seems that a portion of 
the difficulties seem to lie in language rather than in views, and that 
not a little of the confusion is one of words. What Professor Packard 
has to say must necessarily attract attention, and, while not attempting 
to criticise his article as a whole, the reviewer would point out that 
apparently our author has been troubled by Weismann’s terminology, _ 
and does not clearly appreciate the limitations placed by the Freiburg 
zoologist upon the expressions acquired characters, congenital varia- 
tion and the like. Thus (p. 345) Packard quotes the experiments of 
Paul Bert upon Daphniz, in which the adults were killed with salt 
water while the eggs in the brood-sae survived, as “a case in favor of 
the neo-Lamarckian principle,” by which we suppose him to mean that 
the young inherited an acquired character before the parents had ac- 
quired it! 
Again (p. 339), we read, “ If congenital characters are the only ones 
which can be inherited, they must have, in the beginning, originated 
from those acquired during the lifetime of the individual, or, if not in 
the first, in the second or third, or a later generation.” Here the 
answer is easy, the word “ acquired ” is used with a significance totally 
different from its limitation by Weismann, and it is upon this misuse 
of terms that our author is led into this later inquiry, “ If there were 
no such thing as the transmission of characters, either anatomical, 
physiological or mental, originating during the lifetime of an organism, — 
how should we have any evolution resulting in the different groups of 
organisms?” It is, it seems to us, this confusion of words which is at 
the bottom of Professor Packard’s trouble. We think that a careful 
reading of Weismann’s “Ueber die Zahl der Richtungskérper und 
iiber ihre Bedeutung fiir die Vererbung (1887),” will show one easy 
way out of this difficulty ; whether it be the right one or not, we are not 
ready to say. 
‘On the inheritance of acquired characters in animals with a complete meta- 
morphosis. Proc. Am. Acad. Arts and Sciences, XXIX, pp. 331-370, 1894. 
