relationship of offspring to parent is one of direct descent is, as Galton tells us," wholly untenable"; and the only reason he admits some supplementary traces of pangenesis into his "Theory of Heredity, "1 is that he may thus account for the more or less questionable cases of the transmission of acquired characters. But there appears to be no necessity even for this concession. We ought therefore to dispense with the useless and gratuitous hypothesis that cells multiply by throwing off minute self-multiplying gemmules, as well as by the well-known method of self-division. If pangenesis occurs, the transmission of acquired characters ought to be a prominent fact. The size, strength, health and other good or evil qualities of the cells could hardly fail to exercise a marked and corresponding effect upon the size and quality of the reproductive gemmules thrown off by those cells. The direct evidence tends to

1 Contemporary Review, Dec. 1875, pp. 94, 95.

show that these free gemmules do not exist. Transfusion of blood has failed to affect inheritance in the slightest degree. Pangenesis, with its attraction of gemmules from all parts of the body into the germ-cells, and the free circulation of gemmules in the offspring till they hit upon or are attracted by the particular cell or cells, with which alone they can readily unite, seems a less feasible theory and less in conformity with the whole of the facts than an hypothesis of germ-continuity which supposes that the development of the germ-plasm and of the successive self-dividing cells of the body proceeds from within. Darwin's keen analogy of the fertilization of plants by pollen renders development from without conceivable, but as there are no insects to convey gemmules to their destination, each kind of gemmule would have to be exceedingly numerous and easily attracted from amongst an inconceivable number of other gemmules. Arguments against pangenesis

can also be drawn from the case of neuter insects

a fact which seems to have escaped Darwin's notice, although he had seen how strongly that case was opposed to the doctrine which is the essential basis of the theory of pangenesis.

SPENCER'S EXPLANATION OF USE-INHERITANCE.

Mr. Spencer's explanation of the inheritance of the effects of use and disuse (p. 36) is that “while generating a modified consensus of functions and of structures, the activities are at the same time impressing this modified consensus on the sperm-cells and germ-cells whence future individuals are to be produced "—a proposition which reads more like metaphysics than science. Difficult to understand or believe in ordinary instances, such consensus-inheritance seems impossible in cases like that of the hive-bee. Can we suppose that the consensus

of the activities of the working bee impresses

itself on the sperm-cells of the drones and on the germ-cells of the carefully secluded queen ? Büchner thinks so, for he says: "Although the queens and drones do not now work, yet the capacities inherited from earlier times still remain to them, especially to the former, and are kept alive and fresh by the impressions constantly made upon them during life, and they are thus in a position to transmit them to posterity." Surely it is better to abandon a cherished theory than to be compelled to defend it by explanations which are as inconsistent as they are inadequate. New capacities are developed as well as old ones kept fresh. The massacre or expulsion of the drones would have to impress itself on the germ-cells of an onlooking queen, and the imprisonment of the queen on the sperm-cells of the drones-and in such a way, moreover, as to be afterwards developed into action in the neuters only. And use-inheritance all the while is being thoroughly

overpowered by impression-inheritance by the full transmission of that which is merely seen in others! If such a law prevails, one may feel cold because an ancestor thought of the frosty Caucasus. None of this absurdity would arise if it were clearly seen that a parent is only a trustee -that transmission and development are perfectly distinct that parental modifications are irrelevant to those transmitted to offspring.