164 
A. D. Darbishire. 
some critics of Mendelian activity that many of the new conceptions 
which are ascribed to Mendel are in reality due to Weismann. We 
may admit this to be perfectly true in the sense that the Mendelian 
discoveries have succeeded, where bare enunciation failed, in 
bringing home to us the truth of the view put forward by Weismann 
in 1885, without imputing to those who have worked on the 
foundations laid by Mendel any desire to claim anything for him 
which is not his. Nevertheless, in justice to Mendel, it is only right 
to point out that, although we first became familiar with the 
Weismannian conception from Weismann’s lips in 1885, this con¬ 
ception must have been present to Mendel’s mind in 1865 at the 
latest, inasmuch as the theory by which he sought to account for 
his results related solely to the contents of the particular germ- 
cells concerned in the production of each generation, and not to the 
parents or ancestors of that generation. If it is true, as some 
believe, that the Mendelian hypotheses would not have been accepted 
if Weismann had not prepared the way by insisting that attention 
should be fixed primarily on the germ, it is also true that 
Weismann’s conception of inheritance would not have received the 
wide acceptance which it has if it had not been for the manner in 
which the Mendelian discoveries have brought it vividly home to 
men’s minds. 
The relative share which these two men have had in the 
advancement of our understanding of inheritance may further 
be expressed in the statement that whilst Weismann showed what 
the question to be answered, was—namely : how are the characters 
of an organism represented in the germ-cell which produces it ?— 
Mendel invented the machinery by means of which an answer to it 
is being supplied. 
I have laid this emphasis on the community of the object 
which both Mendel and Weismann were effective in forwarding, 
because it supports my thesis that the 19th century was characterized 
by the prevalence of a fog of misapprehension as to the true nature 
of the problem of inheritance, which the solitary efforts of the two 
men, not yet in co-operation, were powerless to disperse. 
The identification of the ends towards which these two men 
were working also makes it possible to understand the result of 
the coming together of two men which is full of the deepest 
interest. This intercourse—it was a correspondence—took place 
between one of the foremost biologists composing that lower 
foggy stratum of thought which carried general biological opinion 
