Thus the race is quietly achieving mastery over the blind forces of nature, and the steady hand of science, coupled with tenderness and sincerity, is pushing back some of the worst horrors of life, and throwing a flood of light and hope into the future! It makes one's step lighter and one's face happier only to think of these marvellous achievements and victories. A new impulse of hope and happiness dawns upon life. I owed this new inspiration to my pessimistic acquaintance—he of the Hunt Club Kennel—and the introduction he gave me to the rudiments of applied surgery. It was indeed a long sweep from the one operation to the other.
My first and second glimpses of the operating-room were surely the two extremes, and yet when I suggested this to Dr. Wyeth, the great and gentle surgeon who performed this operation, he smilingly replied that, after all; either or both—indeed, all of it—was simply common-sense in surgery.
HEREDITY: IS ACQUIRED CHARACTER OR CONDITION TRANSMITTIBLE?
It has been well said by Herbert Spencer, and more recently by Professor Osborn, the able biologist of Columbia College, that the question involved in the discussion of heredity is not a temporary issue and that its solution will affect all future thought. Whether or not acquired character is transmitted to children is the most important question that confronts the human race; for it is upon the character of the race that depends and will depend the condition of the race.
No school of scientists questions the fact of heredity; but there is a warm and greatly misunderstood contest over the exact method used by nature in the transmission. Now so far as the general public is concerned, so far as the sociological features of the case go, so far as personal conduct is involved, it does not matter a straw's weight whether the theory of heredity held by Lamarck and Darwin, or the one advanced recently by Weismann, be correct.
It matters not whether your drunkenness, for example, is transmitted to your child directly as plain drunkenness, or whether it descends to him as a merely weakened and undermined "germ plasm" which "will tend to inebriety, insanity, imbecility" or what not. It matters not a farthing's worth, from the point of view of the laity, whether the transmission is direct, via "pangenesis," or whether it is indirect, via a weakened and vitiated "germ plasm" as per Weismann, or whether the exact method and process may not still lie in the unsolved problems of the laboratory. Whichever or whatever the exact process may be (which interests the scientist only), the facts and results are before us and concern each of us more vitally than does the question of what we shall eat or what we shall drink or wherewithal we shall be clothed. It is all the more unfortunate, therefore, that even an untested scientific theory cannot be advanced without the ignorant, the half-educated and the vicious taking it in some distorted form as a basis of action. Indeed it would seem to be wise, if one is about to make a scientific suggestion of importance, to take the precaution to say in advance that you don't mean it—for the benefit of that large class of intellectual batrachians who hop to the conclusion that you said something totally different from your intent.
Because a surgeon might say to you that he knows a boy who carries a bullet about in his brain and that the youth appears to be no worse for it in either body or mind, it would not be safe to imply that he proposes to teach you that it would be a particularly judicious thing for you to attempt to convert your skull into a cartridge box.
Because Weismann asserts and attempts to prove that nature's method of hereditary transmission precludes (for example) the possibility of producing a race of short-tailed cats from Tom and Tabby from whose caudal appendages a few inches have been artificially subtracted, some of his followers exclaim in glee: "It does not make the least difference in the world what we do or refrain from doing in one lifetime. Our children do not receive the results; we cannot transmit to them our vices or our virtues. We cannot taint their blood by our ill conduct nor purify it by our clean living. The 'germ plasm' from which they came is and has been immortal; we are simply its transmitters—not its creators. Our children were created and their characters and natures determined centuries before we were bom. We are in no sense responsible for what they may be; germ plasm is eternal; we are exempt from responsibility to posterity. Long live Weismann!"
Now this is about the sort of thing that is springing up on every side as a result of the new discussion as to how we are to account for the facts of heredity. One sometimes hears, also, from these half-informed jubilators that "Weismann does not believe in heredity; that old theory is quite exploded." The fact is that Weismann is particularly strong in his belief in heredity—so strong as to give almost no weight to any possible process of intervention in its original workings. He simply holds that the transmission of "acquired character" is not proven, and he doubts the fact of these "acquired" transmissions. In his illustrations he deals chiefly (when in the higher animals) with mutilations, and in the human race shows that the most proficient linguist does not produce children who can read without being taught!