“Up to the present time such necessary conditions have not been sufficiently observed.  The recent experiments themselves are only described in short preliminary notices, which, as regards their accuracy, the possibility of mistake, the precautions taken, and the exact succession of individuals affected, afford no data on which a scientific opinion can be founded” (pp. 81, 82).

The line Professor Weismann takes, therefore, is to discredit the facts; yet on a later page we find that the experiments have since been repeated by Obersteiner, “who has described them in a very exact and unprejudiced manner,” and that “the fact”—­(I imagine that Professor Weismann intends “the facts")—­“cannot be doubted.”

On a still later page, however, we read:—­

“If, for instance, it could be shown that artificial mutilation spontaneously reappears in the offspring with sufficient frequency to exclude all possibilities of chance, then such proof [i.e. that acquired characters can be transmitted] would be forthcoming.  The transmission of mutilations has been frequently asserted, and has been even recently again brought forward, but all the supposed instances have broken down when carefully examined” (p. 390).

Here, then, we are told that proof of the occasional transmission of mutilations would be sufficient to establish the fact, but on p. 267 we find that no single fact is known which really proves that acquired characters can be transmitted, “for the ascertained facts which seem to point to the transmission of artificially produced diseases cannot be considered as proof.” [Italics mine.] Perhaps; but it was mutilation in many cases that Professor Weismann practically admitted to have been transmitted when he declared that Obersteiner had verified Brown-Sequard’s experiments.

That Professor Weismann recognizes the vital importance to his own theory of the question whether or no mutilations can be transmitted under any circumstances, is evident from a passage on p. 425 of his work, on which he says:  “It can hardly be doubted that mutilations are acquired characters; they do not arise from any tendency contained in the germ, but are merely the reaction of the body under certain external influences.  They are, as I have recently expressed it, purely somatogenic characters—­viz. characters which emanate from the body (soma) only, as opposed to the germ-cells; they are, therefore, characters that do not arise from the germ itself.

“If mutilations must necessarily be transmitted” [which no one that I know of has maintained], “or even if they might occasionally be transmitted” [which cannot, I imagine, be reasonably questioned], “a powerful support would be given to the Lamarckian principle, and the transmission of functional hypertrophy or atrophy would thus become highly probable.”