Abstract
IN an address to the Naturforscher-Versammlung at Cologne, last autumn (now published in a compact pamphlet of fifty-two pages), Dr. Weismann examined the evidence for the inheritance of injuries. In earlier works he has shown that the facts of organic evolution can be explained without the hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characters, and his theory of the germ-plasma as the basis of heredity is hardly compatible with the traditional and Lamarckian view. The supporters of the old view have laid great stress upon the transmission of the effects of injuries. A great many of the cases relied on rest on merely anecdotal evidence, and Weismann examines and dismisses many types of them. Such, for instance, is the case adduced by Dr. Zacharias, and quoted by Eimer, of a tailless cat which produced tailless kittens. Nothing whatever of how the mother lost her tail is known, and nothing is known of the father. Tailless kittens appearing suddenly in villages have been traced, more than once, to an imported male of one of the many tailless breeds. In any particular case, it is as logical to refer the appearance of tailless kittens to a hypothetical mutilation of the mother, as it would be to deduce from the many-toed Oxford cats that Mr. Poulton had fixed additional toes on the paws of their ancestor!
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M., P. Weismann on the Inheritance of Injuries.1. Nature 40, 303 (1889). https://doi.org/10.1038/040303a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/040303a0