This very same year a popular scientific journal came to the rescue of the transmission theory with the following incident purporting to have taken place 22 years before, in 1864. “A pregnant merino sheep broke its right foreleg about two inches above the knee-joint; the limb was put in splints and healed a long time before the following March, when the animal produced young. The lamb possessed a ring of black wool from two to three inches in breadth round the place at which the mother’s leg had been broken, and upon the same leg.” When this incident was related to Weismann, he replied, “It is a pity that the black wool was not arranged in the form of the inscription ‘to the memory of the fractured leg of my dear mother.’”
Writing in the following year Weismann says, “Furthermore, the mutilations of certain parts of the human body, as practised by different nations from time immemorial, have not in a single instance, led to the malformation or reduction of the parts in question. Such hereditary effects have been produced neither by circumcision nor the removal of the front teeth, nor the boring of holes in the lips or nose, nor the extraordinary artificial crushing and crippling of the feet of Chinese women. No child among any of the nations referred to possesses the slightest trace of these mutilations when born; they have to be acquired anew in each generation.”
While it is undoubtedly true that much in Weismann’s position lacks experimental demonstration, it is equally true that when the heat of the discussion somewhat subsided, his theories were well to the fore, and they have since secured a wide acceptance among competent authorities. It is hardly to be expected that his two greatest critics, Spencer and Haeckel, would look with much favor on a theory the acceptance of which would make necessary the re-writing of those many volumes which constitute their lifework. Lankester, himself no mean authority, in translating Haeckel’s “History of Creation,” feels constrained to say in the preface, “I feel it due to myself to state that I do not agree with him as to a very large part of his views on classification, and as to his belief in the necessity of assuming the ‘transmissibility of acquired characters.’ Readers who have gained an interest in these questions from the brief statements of the present work must, without assuming that Professor Haeckel’s judgment is final, go on to study for themselves the works of Weismann and others which are mentioned with perfect fairness in these pages.”