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Updated: May 19, 2025
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.
Wallace is endorsing Professor Weismann's view, but I have found it impossible to collect anything that enables me to define his position confidently in this respect. This is natural enough, for Mr. Wallace has entitled his book "Darwinism," and a work denying that use and disuse produced any effect could not conceivably be called Darwinism. Mr.
He does not indeed put his faith prominently forward and pin himself to it as plainly as could be wished, but under the heading "The Non- Heredity of Acquired Characters," he writes as follows on p. 440 of his recent work in reference to Professor Weismann's Theory of Heredity:
The mingling of the two produces a germ-plasm and individual differing from both of the parents. Thus, according to Weismann's earlier view, the origin of variation was to be sought in sexual reproduction through the mingling of slightly different germ-plasms. But how did these two germ-plasms come to be different? How was the variation started?
The nature must be deeply affected before a change in the person is registered. Personality is not synonomous with inherited disposition; but it bears a similar relation to nature as inherited disposition does to acquired habit. It is to nature what character is to action. It is to nature what in Weismann's theory the germ plasm is to the somatic cell.
I see Professor S. H. Vines, in the article on Weismann's theory referred to in my preceding article, says Mr.
Weismann's theory is clear, simple and convenient, but incomplete; for, unlike Darwin's theory of pangenesis, it scarcely attempts any real explanation of the extremely complex potentialities possessed by the reproductive elements.
The fundamental proposition of Weismann's theory, that heredity is due to continuity of germ-plasm, seems to contain important truth. But we need not therefore accept his theory of a germ-plasm so isolated and independent as to be beyond control or influence by the habits of the body.
I have nothing, however, to do with Mr. Darwin's theory of pangenesis beyond avoiding the pretence that I understand either the theory itself or what Professor Weismann says about it; all I am concerned with is Professor Weismann's admission, made immediately afterwards, that the somatic cells may, and perhaps sometimes do, impart characteristics to the germ-cells.
It is to be found in the preface which he wrote to Professor Weismann's "Studies in the Theory of Descent," published in 1881. "Several distinguished naturalists," says Mr.
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