Sarah, who sought to excuse the illegitimacy of her child by the plea that "it was a very little one." In his reply to Mr. Herbert Spencer's articles[1] he has made matters worse by explaining it on the supposition that "spermatozoa occasionally reach the ovary, and there enter into some of the immature eggs. Amphimixis can not proceed, as the germ-plasm of the egg is not ripe, but the nucleus of the sperm cell continues to live in certain circumstances, and so remains till the time of a subsequent coitus with another mate."[2]
It is obvious that in such a case the "subsequent coitus" need have nothing to do with the matter; whenever the egg was ripe there would be nothing to prevent amphimixis taking place, followed by all the stages of ontogeny, and we should have a case of parthenogenesis in the mammalia. If this were possible in the human race it would create something of a ripple in the social world.
Prof. Weismann does not deny that certain diseases, especially germ diseases, are hereditary and directly transmissible in the first instance, and he admits that this has "definitely been proved to occur in the case of syphilis. The father, as well as the mother, is capable of transmitting this disease to the embryo, and the only possible explanation of this fact is, therefore, that the specific bacteria of syphilis can be transmitted by the spermatozoön."[3] But he will not admit that this constitutes a case of the transmission of acquired characters, undertakes to connect it with the adaptation of the parasite to the host, and concludes:
"It will, I think, at any rate be conceded that a 'constitutional' disease can not be taken as a proof that the processes of heredity are therein concerned until we can determine wdiether we are actually dealing with heredity—i. e., the transmission of a constitution and not only with a transference of microbes."[4]
This all seems very absurd to the average reader, and conveys the impression that the scientific discussion of these questions has, after all, no interest for the public, and only amounts to a useless hair-splitting on the part of the doctors. For what matters it to the consumptive whether his case is one of "the transmission of a constitution" or "the transference of microbes"? Mr. Spencer, in the articles above referred to, has sufficiently characterized the reasoning which allows a microscopically visible microbe to pene-
- ↑ The Inadequacy of "Natural Selection." Contemporary Review for February, March, and May, 1893; reprint, London, Williams & Norgate; New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1893, p. 69.
- ↑ The All-sufficiency of Natural Selection. A Reply to Herbert Spencer. Contemporary Review for September and October, 1893, p. 609.
- ↑ The Germ-Plasm, p. 388.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 891.
