A. D. Darbishire. 
168 
or no, Weldon believed in the the theory of Pangenesis (which his 
view of inheritance in reality involves), in some form or another, 
I do not know. He was perpetually insisting that it was our 
business first to describe hereditary phenomena, and then, after this 
had been done, to attempt to account for them; so that I think that 
the answer he would have given, if asked, would have been that he 
considered that the time for interpretation was not yet come. But 
this is mere conjecture. 
The essential point about Weldon’s concluding sentence, 
which I desire to lay before you is this:—so entirely on the 
somatic “ plane,” if I may so express it, were his thoughts about 
inheritance that the antithesis between what he was attacking 
and what he was upholding did not appear to him as the anti¬ 
thesis between (a) the germinal theory of inheritance, which we 
associate with Weismann, and ( b) the somatic theory of inheritance 
of Charles Darwin and Nageli, but as the antithesis between (a) a 
theory of inheritance which takes the somatic characters of the 
parents plus those of a great number of the ancestors into 
account and ( b) a theory which relates to the somatic characters of 
the parents alone; whereas, as I maintain, the basis on which 
the whole of the modern attempt to deal with the problem of 
heredity rests is the doctrine that the somatic characters both of 
the parents and of the .remoter ancestors may be left out of 
account in the attempt to predict the result of a given mating, 
except, of course, so far as they afford an indication as to the 
nature of the gametes born by them. Bateson answers that part 
of Weldon’s criticism which I have quoted in the following words 
“ I should rather have said that it was from Mendel, first of all 
men, that we have learnt not to regard the effects produced upon 
offspring as due to the existence in the parent of particular 
structural characters. We have come rather to disregard the 
particular structure of the parent, except in so far as it may give 
us as a guide to the nature of the gametes.” But this conception is 
identical with that which we associate with the name of Weismann. 
Let us not trouble about the trivial question as to whose name we 
shall associate it with. Let us call it the germinal theory of 
inheritance, and note that it occurred independently to Mendel and 
Weismann, amongst others. By the germinal theory of inheritance 
I mean the view, already stated above, that the characteristics of 
organisms are determined by the potentialities existing in the germ- 
cells which give rise to them; and are not determined, as they are 
