“A complete and satisfactory refutation of such an opinion,” he continues, “cannot be brought forward at present”; so I suppose we must wait a little longer, but in the meantime we may again remark that, if we admit even occasional communication of changes in the somatic cells to the germ-cells, we have let in the thin end of the wedge, as Mr. Darwin did when he said that use and disuse did a good deal towards modification.  Buffon, in his first volume on the lower animals, {288} dwells on the impossibility of stopping the breach once made by admission of variation at all.  “If the point,” he writes, “were once gained, that among animals and vegetables there had been, I do not say several species, but even a single one, which had been produced in the course of direct descent from another species; if, for example, it could be once shown that the ass was but a degeneration from the horse—­then there is no farther limit to be set to the power of Nature, and we should not be wrong in supposing that with sufficient time she could have evolved all other organized forms from one primordial type.”  So with use and disuse and transmission of acquired characteristics generally—­once show that a single structure or instinct is due to habit in preceding generations, and we can impose no limit on the results achievable by accumulation in this respect, nor shall we be wrong in conceiving it as possible that all specialization, whether of structure or instinct, may be due ultimately to habit.

How far this can be shown to be probable is, of course, another matter, but I am not immediately concerned with this; all I am concerned with now is to show that the germ-cells not unfrequently become permanently affected by events that have made a profound impression upon the somatic cells, in so far that they transmit an obvious reminiscence of the impression to the embryos which they go subsequently towards forming.  This is all that is necessary for my case, and I do not find that Professor Weismann, after all, disputes it.

But here, again, comes the difficulty of saying what Professor Weismann does, and what he does not, dispute.  One moment he gives all that is wanted for the Lamarckian contention, the next he denies common sense the bare necessaries of life.  For a more exhaustive and detailed criticism of Professor Weismann’s position, I would refer the reader to an admirably clear article by Mr. Sidney H. Vines, which appeared in Nature, October 24, 1889.  I can only say that while reading Professor Weismann’s book, I feel as I do when I read those of Mr. Darwin, and of a good many other writers on biology whom I need not name.  I become like a fly in a window-pane.  I see the sunshine and freedom beyond, and buzz up and down their pages, ever hopeful to get through them to the fresh air without, but ever kept back by a mysterious something, which I feel but cannot either grasp or see.  It was not thus when I read Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck; it is not thus when I read such articles as Mr. Vines’s just referred to.  Love of self-display, and the want of singleness of mind that it inevitably engenders—­these, I suppose, are the sins that glaze the casements of most men’s minds; and from these, no matter how hard he tries to free himself, nor how much he despises them, who is altogether exempt?