erve in the congenitally toeless animal has inherited the power of
passing through all the different morbid states which have occurred in
one of its parents from the time of the division till after its reunion
with the peripheric end. It is not, therefore, simply the power of
performing an action which is inherited, but the power of performing a
whole series of actions, in a certain order.'

"In most of the cases of inheritance recorded by Brown-Sequard only one
of the two parents had been operated upon and was affected. He concludes
by expressing his belief that 'what is transmitted is the morbid state of
the nervous system,' due to the operation performed on the parents."

Mr. Darwin proceeds to give other instances of inherited effects of
mutilations:--

"With the horse there seems hardly a doubt that exostoses on the legs,
caused by too much travelling on hard roads, are inherited. Blumenbach
records the case of a man who had his little 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