The Transmission of Acquired Characters, and Panmixia

Abstract

I SUPPOSE that a correspondent has no claim to limit the scope of a discussion in such a journal as NATURE. At the same time I feel it to be a rather severe burden when I am called upon to expound, in answer to one letter after another, the merest common-places of the subject under discussion, and to retail in this place the substance of books like Weismann's “Essay” and Wallace's “Darwinism” (to which the attention of your readers has been already drawn by reviews), not to mention the “Philosophie Zoologique” and the “Origin of Species.” It seems to me that there might be interest and profit in opening your columns to the statement of newly observed cases which seem to tell in favour of either the Lamarckian or the anti-Lamarckian theories, or to novel criticisms of any cases which have already been discussed elsewhere; but surely the repeated citation of familiar exploded “cases,” and the reiteration of arguments and beliefs which have long since received attention, is not fair to the writers who have dealt with these cases and these arguments in admirable treatises which are well known (I am happy to think) to nearly all serious students of these questions.