f purely
artificially-produced disorders, and so misses the point which is really
at issue. He proceeds, however, to state more definitely that "men who
have prostrated their nervous systems by prolonged overwork or in some
other way, have children more or less prone to nervousness." The
following observations will, I think, warrant at least a suspension of
judgment concerning this particular form of use-inheritance.

(1) The nervousness is seen in the _children_ at an early age, although
the nervous prostration from which it is supposed to be derived
obviously occurs in the parent at a much later period of life. This
change in time is contrary to the rule of inheritance at corresponding
periods; and, together with the unusual promptness and comparative
completeness of the inheritance, it may indicate a special injury or
deterioration of the reproductive elements rather than true inheritance.
The healthy brain of early life has failed to transmit its robust
condition. Is use-inheritance, then, only effective for evil? Does it
only transfer the newly-acquired weakness, and not the previous
long-continued vigour?

(2) Members of nervous families would be liable to suffer from nervous
prostration, and by the ordinary law of heredity alone would transmit
nervousness to their children.

(3) The shattered nerves or insanity resulting from alcoholic and other
excesses, or from overwork or trouble, are evidently signs of a grave
constitutional injury which may react upon the reproductive elements
nourished and developed in that ruined constitution. The deterioration
in parent and child may often display itself in the same organs--those
probably which are hereditarily weakest. Acquired diseases or disorders
thus appear to be transmitted, when all that was conveyed to the
offspring was the exciting cause of a lowered vitality or disordered
action, together with the ancestral liability to such diseases under
such conditions.

(4) Francis Galton says that "it is hard to find evidence of the power
of the personal structure to react upon the sexual elements, that is not
open to serious objection." Some of the cases of apparent inheritance he
regards as coincidence of effect. Thus "the fact that a drunkard will
often have imbecile children, although his offspring previous to his
taking to drink were healthy," is an "instance of simultaneous action,"
and not of true inheritance. "The alcohol pervades his tissues, and, of
course, a