le finger on
the right hand almost cut off, and which in consequence grew
crooked, and his sons had the same finger on the same hand similarly
crooked. A soldier, fifteen years before his marriage, lost his
left eye from purulent ophthalmia, and his two sons were
microphthalmic on the same side."

The late Professor Rolleston, whose competence as an observer no one
is likely to dispute, gave Mr. Darwin two cases as having fallen
under his own notice, one of a man whose knee had been severely
wounded, and whose child was born with the same spot marked or
scarred, and the other of one who was severely cut upon the cheek,
and whose child was born scarred in the same place. Mr. Darwin's
conclusion was that "the effects of injuries, especially when
followed by disease, or perhaps exclusively when thus followed, are
occasionally inherited."

Let us now see what Professor Weismann has to say against this. He
writes:--

"The only cases worthy of discussion are the well-known experiments
upon guinea-pigs conducted by the French physiologist, Brown-
Sequard. But the explanation of his results is, in my opinion, open
to discussion. In these cases we have to do with the apparent
transmission of artificially produced malformations. . . . All
these effects were said to be transmitted to descendants as far as
the fifth or sixth generation.

"But we must inquire whether these cases are really due to heredity,
and not to simple infection. In the case of epilepsy, at any rate,
it is easy to imagine that the passage of some specific organism
through the reproductive cells may take place, as in the case of
syphilis. We are, however, entirely ignorant of the nature of the
former disease. This suggested explanation may not perhaps apply to
the other cases; but we must remember that animals which have been
subjected to such severe operations upon the nervous system have
sustained a great shock, and if they are capable of breeding, it is
only probable that they will produce weak descendants, and such as
are easily affected by disease. Such a result does not, however,
explain why the offspring should suffer from the same disease as
that which was artificially induced in the parents. But this does
not appear to have been by any means invariably the case. Brown-
Sequard himself says: 'The changes in the eye of the offspring were
of a very variable nature, and were only occasionally exactly
similar to those observed in the pare