112 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
was able, for instance, to raise the percentage of females from 
the normal of about fifty to the abnormal of about ninety. 
Here, then, an environmental influence, playing in the first 
place on the nutritive system, saturated throughout the 
organism, and affected the reproductive system so as to swing 
the balance emphatically to the female side. General hyper- 
trophy brought out of the primitive indifference an emphatic 
predominance of females. In this case the reproductive 
system was unquestionably reached, and though the change 
that resulted was not, of course, one that was not in a sense 
implicit in the reproductive cells, it was none the less an 
alteration of the natural bias. Some of the forms which 
turned out females would with less nourishment in their 
natural environment have become males. Now the difference 
between a quantitative change such as the above and a quali- 
tative change such as the modification of a given structure, is 
only one of degree. Admit the one, and there is no logical 
objection against admitting the possibility of any other 
modification which can be interpreted in terms of anabolic 
or katabolic preponderance. 
My general conclusion, then, is, that while Weismann’s position in 
regard to the non-inheritance of acquired characters suggests the 
advisability of a cautious re-criticism of all apparent cases of the 
reverse, Galton’s position of the limited inheritance of the same 
features is at present more tenable. Apart from the three argu- 
ments — (1) from alleged cases, (2) from pathological inheritance, 
(3) from the general theory of evolution — it seems to me that the 
physiological probabilities are strongly in favour of Galton’s view. 
Nor is it at all necessary, in allowing the limited inheritance of 
acquired characters, to depart from some form of the theory of 
continuity on which Weismann has so well insisted. It is not 
necessary to revert to any literal pangenesis. It is only necessary 
to admit that decisive functional and environmental variations may 
send their roots deep into the system, and may affect the reproduc- 
tive cells along with and even through the others. The sex-cells 
will share in the altered nutriment and waste products, and become 
infected to a varying degree by the anastates and katastates, which 
are the chemical results of the individually acquired characters. 
