Weismann’s Twelve Points.

The most striking remarks from the 1895 essay on germinal selection are:—

1. “The real aim of the present essay is to rehabilitate the principle of selection. If I should succeed in reinstating this principle in its imperilled rights, it would be a source of extreme satisfac­tion to me.”[14]

2. Speaking of the whole theory of selection he claimed to have found a position “which is necessary to protect it against the many doubts which gathered around it on all sides like so many lowering thunder-clouds.”[15] And he speaks on page 26 of “the flood of objections against the theory of selection touching its inability to modify many parts at once.”

Thus Weismann stood forth to defend the crumbling edifice of Darwinism and threw his shining sword into the scales, a scientific Athanasius “contending for our all.” Again is seen a friend of Darwin from another camp than that of Mendel, whose support needs to be received with some caution. Toujours en vedette is a useful rule.

3. Speaking of adaptedness in animated nature he says, “We know of only one natural principle of explana­tion for this fact—that of selection.”[16]

4. “Germinal selection is the last consequence of the applica­tion of the principle of Malthus to living nature.”[17]

5. “Without doubt the theory (Germinal Selection) requires that the initial steps of a variation should also have selective value.”[18]

6. “Something is still wanting in the theory of Darwin and Wallace which it is obligatory on us to discover if we possibly can. We must seek to discover why it happens that useful variations are always present.”[19]

7. “It is impossible to do without the assump­tion that the useful variations are always present, or that they always exist in a sufficiently large number of individuals for the selective process.”[20]

8. “Some profound connexions must exist between the utility of a variation and its actual appearance, or the direction of the variation of a part must be determined by utility.”[21]

9. That “germinal selection performs the same services for the understanding of observed transformations . . . that a heredity of acquired characters would perform without rendering necessary so violent an assump­tion!”[22] (Italics mine.)

10. Weismann speaks warmly of Professor Lloyd Morgan for his caution and calmness of judgment but complains of him that he “has not been able to abandon completely the heredity of acquired characters.”[23]

11. As to passive effects of environment, etc., he says “the Lamarckian principle is here excluded ab initio.”[24]

12. “It seems to me that a hypothesis of this kind (Lamarckism) has performed its services and must be discarded the moment it is found to be at hopeless variance with the facts.”[25]

I have only to add here that several years ago I wrote to Weismann drawing his attention to some facts I had observed which seemed to me to be instances of use-inheritance, and I received a reply in polite but brief and Prussian terms to the effect that the facts referred to must be capable of some other interpreta­tion, for the machinery for their transmission did not exist.

Each of these twelve quotations from Weismann’s essay is important from the present point of view, and shows how far neo-Darwinians are likely to promote the greater glory of Darwin, and though more than a quarter of a century elapsed between this essay and his death Weismann was not the man to have repudiated any of these strong statements.