"
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.
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