haracter is thus
demonstrated.

The experiments of _Miss de Chauvin_ on salamanders (_Axolotl_) are
still more conclusive, for we are dealing here with characters
acquired through aquatic or aerial media, which can hardly act on the
sexual glands. We cannot continue this subject any further and we
return to the work of _Semon_. It is needless to say that the nature
of mnemic engraphia remains itself an unknown quantity. As long as we
are unable to transform inert matter into a living organism we shall
remain in ignorance. But, when it is accepted with the laws of the
phenomena which it produces, this unknown quantity, as _Semon_ has
shown, alone suffices to explain all the rest, and is already a great
step toward the comprehension of the laws which govern life.

=Blastophthoria.=--By blastophthoria, or deterioration of the germ, I
mean what might also be called false heredity, that is to say, the
results of all direct pathogenic or disturbing action, especially that
of certain intoxications, on the germinal cells, whose hereditary
determinants are thus changed. Blastophthoria thus acts on germs not
yet conjugated, through the medium of their bearers, and creates at
their origin _hereditary stigmata_ of all kinds, while true heredity
only combines and reproduces the ancestral energies.

Blastophthoria deranges the mneme or hereditary engrams, and
consequently a more or less considerable part of their ecphorias
during the life of the individuals which arise from them. It is not a
question here of the reproduction of the hereditary ancestral energies
in the descendants (in different combinations) as is the case in the
heredity which we have just studied, but, on the contrary, a question
of their perturbation. However, the store of cells reserved as
germinal cells in the embryo, the germ of which has been damaged by
blastophthoric action, being usually also affected by the disturbing
cause, it follows that the pathological change introduced by
blastophthoria in the hereditary mneme is transmitted to the
descendants by ordinary heredity. In this way blastophthoria deposits
the first germ of most pathological degenerations by causing immediate
deviation of all the determinants of the germ in the same direction.

The most typical and the commonest example of blastophthoria is that
of alcoholic intoxication. The spermatozoa of alcoholics suffer like
the other tissues from the toxic action of alcohol on the protoplasm.
The