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Darwin's conclusion was that "the effects of injuries, especially when followed by disease, or perhaps exclusively when thus followed, are occasionally inherited." Let us now see what Professor Weismann has to say against this. He writes: "The only cases worthy of discussion are the well-known experiments upon guinea-pigs conducted by the French physiologist, Brown- Sequard.
" . . . Brown Sequard has bred during thirty years many thousand guinea-pigs, . . . nor has he ever seen a guinea-pig born without toes which was not the offspring of parents WHICH HAD GNAWED OFF THEIR OWN TOES, owing to the sciatic nerve having been divided.
The work on this subject is a tribute to medicine and one pauses in respect and admiration before the names and labors of Brown, Sequard, Addison, Graves and Basedow, Horsley, King, Schiff, Schafer, Takamine, Marie, Cushing, Kendal, Sajous and others of equal insight and patient endeavor.
Of this fact thirteen instances were carefully recorded, and a greater number were seen; yet Brown Sequard speaks of such cases as among the rarer forms of inheritance. It is not therefore the power of simply performing an action which is inherited, but the power of performing a whole series of actions in a certain order."
Brown-Séquard, as the outstanding figure in the history of the glands of internal secretion, deserves some notice as a personality. In the words of the note-makers for novels and plays, he was a card. He was born in 1817 at Port-Louis, on the island of Mauritius, off Africa, then French property. His father was a Mr. Brown, an American sea captain; his mother a Mme. Séquard, a Frenchwoman.
I feel inclined to say it is not merely the original wound that is remembered, but the whole process of cure which is now accordingly repeated. Brown Sequard concludes, as Mr. Darwin tells us, "that what is transmitted is the morbid state of the nervous system," due to the operation performed on the parents. A little lower down Mr.
Still there was a change of demeanor, for the aims of his career as a scientist were now less obtrusive in his mind than thoughts of his family. And with the arrival of Dr. Brown -Sequard he resumed the language of his youth, so that his last words were uttered in French.
Brown- Sequard himself says: 'The changes in the eye of the offspring were of a very variable nature, and were only occasionally exactly similar to those observed in the parents.
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