612 SUMMARY OF CURRENT RESEARCHES RELATING TO 
Mr. Lloyd Morgan’s paper on “Natural Elimination” may be re- 
ferred to. 
Transmission of Acquired Characters.* — Herr K. Knauthe notes the 
following three cases which suggest to him that acquired characters 
may be transmitted : (1) A cow twisted one of its horns so that the point, 
formerly directed upwards, was turned downwards. One of its calves 
(a female) had the same peculiarity. (2) An ugly way of holding the 
tail was traced from a mare through two generations. (3) Two bull- 
dogs were taught to “ carry.” One of the offspring of this pair was 
sent away when quite young ; without any training it exhibited the 
habit of carrying sticks and other objects from its youth up. 
Inheritance of Acquired Characters.! — Prof. M. Wilckens opposes 
Weismann’s view on this subject on account of his own observations on 
artificial selection in domestic animals. He points out the undeniable 
fact that the characters of an English racehorse, for example, tend to be 
transmitted to its offspring, and by applying the term “ acquired ” to 
these characters he arrives at the conclusion that Weismann’s “ theory 
is false and cannot be reconciled with the facts.” 
With regard to the inheritance of mutilations he points out that 
all the experience of the practical breeder is against the possibility. 
With regard to the inheritance of characters acquired through 
climatic influences he asserts that measurements made in his own labo- 
ratory prove that, not only do cattle of the same breed vary with 
regard to the thickness of the hide and the length of the horns according 
to the climate, but that these variations are inherited. Dr. Wilckens 
also considers that the facts of physiology are opposed to the idea that 
the germ-plasma can remain uninfluenced by the nutrition and meta- 
bolism of the organism. In all this, however, there seems to be lacking 
a precise appreciation of Weismann’s position as now stated. 
Ontogeny and Regeneration 4 — Dr. F. von Wagner has investigated 
the processes of regeneration of organs, with a view to testing the 
validity of the common assumption that these processes run parallel to 
embryonic development ; that tissues and organs are reformed by cells 
of the same embryonic layer as that from which they first took 
origin. With regeneration are also included ordinary processes of 
asexual budding. In the budding of Hydra and some polypes, Lang § 
has already shown that the ectoderm and endoderm of the bud alike arise 
from the ectoderm of the parent. Lang endeavours to harmonize this 
with embryonic conditions by asserting that the ectoderm of the parent, 
over the budding area, is homologous with the blastoderm of the embryo. 
This is, however, an untenable position, and cannot conceal the fact that 
budding is not a repetition of embryonic development in the case of these 
bydropolypes. 
In his own experiments, especially on Microstoma , Dr. Wagner found 
that the pharynx was regenerated by the parenchyma of the body — that 
is by a mesoblastic tissue, while in ontogeny it arose from the ectoderm. 
The parenchyma also reformed the nerve-ring when this was destroyed. 
* Zool. Anzeig., xvi. (1893) p. 174. 
t Biol. Centralbl., xiii. (1893) pp. 420-7. X Tom. cit., pp. 287-96. 
§ Zeitschr. f. wiss. Zool., liv. pp. 366 et seq. 
