"
Mr. Romanes, writing in Nature, March 18, 1890, and opposing certain
details of Professor Weismann's theory, so far supports it as to say
that "there is the gravest possible doubt lying against the
supposition that any really inherited decrease is due to the
inherited effects of disuse." The "gravest possible doubt" should
mean that Mr. Romanes regards it as a moral certainty that disuse
has no transmitted effect in reducing an organ, and it should follow
that he holds use to have no transmitted effect in its development.
The sequel, however, makes me uncertain how far Mr. Romanes intends
this, and I would refer the reader to the article which Mr. Romanes
has just published on Weismann in the Contemporary Review for this
current month.
The burden of Mr. Thiselton Dyer's controversy with the Duke of
Argyll (see Nature, January 16, 1890, et seq.) was that there was no
evidence in support of the transmission of any acquired
modification. The orthodoxy of science, therefore, must be held as
giving at any rate a provisional support to Professor Weismann, but
all of them, including even Professor Weismann himself, shrink from
committing themselves to the opinion that the germ-cells of any
organisms remain in all cases unaffected by the events that occur to
the other cells of the same organism, and until they do this they
have knocked the bottom out of their case.
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