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But while this cause accepted by these few is a true cause, since unquestionably during the life of the individual organism changes of function produce changes of structure; and while it is a tenable hypothesis that changes of structure so produced are inheritable; yet it was manifest to those not prepossessed, that this cause cannot with reason be assigned for the greater part of the facts.
But not pressing these questions, it suffices to point out the necessary implication that changed functions of organs do, in some way or other, register themselves in changed proclivities of the reproductive elements. In face of these facts it cannot be denied that the modified action of a part produces an inheritable effect be the nature of that effect what it may.
By this means our Constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors.
A further important difference between the two inquiries is that to ascertain whether a fortuitous variation is inheritable, needs merely a little attention to the selection of individuals and the observation of offspring; while to ascertain whether there is inheritance of a functionally-produced modification, it is requisite to make arrangements which demand the greater or smaller exercise of some part or parts; and it is difficult in many cases to find such arrangements, troublesome to maintain them even for one generation, and still more through successive generations.
These estates of inheritance, both the greater and the meaner, were not fiefs; they were to all purposes allodial, and had hardly a single property of a feud; they descended equally to all the children, males and females, according to the custom of gavelkind, a custom absolutely contrary to the genius of the feudal tenure; and whenever estates were granted in the later Saxon times by the bounty of the crown with an intent that they should be inheritable, so far were they from being granted with the complicated load of all the feudal services annexed, that in all the charters of that kind which subsist they are bestowed with a full power of alienation, et liberi ab omni seculari gravamine.
There must apparently be a constitutional or inheritable predisposition or fitness for the habits spoken of, which otherwise would scarcely be continued for many generations, except by the favourably-varying branches of a family: which again is selection rather than use-inheritance. Where is the necessity for even the remains of the Lamarckian doctrine of inherited habit?
These sophisters substitute a fictitious cause, and feigned personages, in whose favor they suppose you engaged, whenever you defend the inheritable nature of the crown.
That this flower had an extra number of petals, that that was unusually symmetrical, and that another differed considerably in colour from the average of its kind, would be easily seen by an observant gardener; and the suspicion that such anomalies are inheritable having arisen, experiments leading to further proofs that they are so, would frequently be made.
Darwin's statement that it has probably "been the main agent in rendering organs rudimentary," no limits are assignable to the accumulated effects of habit, provided the effects of habit, or use and disuse, are supposed, as Mr. Darwin supposed them, to be inheritable at all. Darwinians have at length woke up to the dilemma in which they are placed by the manner in which Mr.
The fact that the weaker go to the wall does not bring about the greater strength of the stronger; it is the consequence of this last and not the cause unless, indeed, it be contended that a knowledge that the weak go to the wall stimulates the strong to exertions which they would not otherwise so make, and that these exertions produce inheritable modifications.
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