Note 43 — VIII.

At the death of Darwin the Sozialdemokrat of the 27th of April, 1882, wrote: "The proletariat who are struggling for their emancipation will ever honor the memory of Charles Darwin."

Conf. Lafargue, La théorie darwinienne.

I am well aware that in these last years, perhaps in consequence of the relations between Darwinism and socialism, consideration has again been given to the objections to the theory of Darwin, made by Voegeli, and more recently by Weismann, on the hereditary transmissibility of acquired characters. See Spencer, The Inadequacy of Natural Selection, Paris, 1894.—Virchow, Transformisme et descendance, Berlin, 1893. But all this merely concerns such or such a detail of Darwinism, while the fundamental theory of metamorphic organic development remains impregnable.