Note 3 — Chapter II · REVIEW OF THE POSITION

The above remark as to the jubilee-volume needs to be explained and justified. In it there is an important essay on each of the great provinces of Weismann, Mendel and de Vries, and in each of these the highest living exponent speaks, Professors Weismann, Bateson and de Vries. Bateson expresses admiration for Weismann’s destructive work, but shows plainly that he holds it to have failed in its fundamental purpose. Nevertheless, by a neat tour d’addresse he adopts Weismann’s uncompromising attitude on the inheritance of acquired characters, which happens to agree exceedingly well with his own scheme. He has but one insignificant reference to de Vries on p. 95 where he finds help for his doctrine.

Weismann makes no reference to Mendel or de Vries. De Vries makes none to Weismann or Mendel, but without stating it in his essay he is known to be in opposition to Weismann’s dogma on the inheritance of acquired characters. These three eminent biologists would thus seem to have worked on diverging lines. The two first agree heartily, Weismann explicitly and Bateson by implication, as to the forbidden doctrine, “on the ground that it closes the way to deeper insight”—in other words their mutually destructive theories. So it stands thus in the book—Weismann throws over Lamarck, Mendel and de Vries; Bateson throws over Weismann (as again in 1914) and de Vries; de Vries ignores Weismann and Mendel.

Dr. Lock in his book on Variation, Heredity and Evolution, 1906, says that Weismann practically ignores the evidence of Mendelism in heredity, and adds, p. 261, “But at the next step the Mendelian parts company with Weismann.”

One cannot avoid noticing, incidentally, that the vast mass of work of the biometricians led by Galton, Weldon and Professor Karl Pearson is conspicuously absent from the book. Prof. J. Arthur Thomson says that there should be no opposition between Mendelian and Galtonian formulæ, “they are correlated, and ultimately they will be seen in complete harmony as different aspects of the same phenomena. But it is simply muddleheadedness which can find any opposition between a statistical formula applicable to averages of successive generations breeding freely, and a physiological formula applicable to particular sets of cases where parents with contrasted dominant and recessive characters are crossed and their hybrid offspring are inbred.”(a) concerning which see the Preface to Bateson’s Mendel’s Principles of Heredity, 1902, with remarks on some of the Galtonians.

(a) Heredity, p. 374.