The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE IMPORTANCE OF BREEDING EXPERIMENTS We must needs descend below man, the species homo sapiens, because neither direct observation of family, nor statistical comparison of thousands of observations will yield the solution. The only way to bring a definite solution about is by methodical breeding experiments for which, of course, humans cannot be drawn upon. We are limited to the animal and vegetable kingdoms which, in a way, are to be preferred, because the members of these two kingdoms offer better possibilities of comparison than the intricate and confusing conditions and manifestations that humans present. But what conclusions may we draw from inheritance in animals and vegetables? What may we deduce from the results of our research work within these two spheres below man, as far as regenerative inheritance is concerned? In that respect, we may readily depend upon the miraculous oneness of living nature. The law of nature, which manifests itself in the inferior kingdoms of the animal and vegetable, has proved to be valid for our superior species. For this reason, the greater part of our medical knowledge is substantiated by animal experimentation. And for the same reason, Gregor Mendel discovered his laws of heredity, experimenting with peas and wall-flowers in the gardenof the monastery in Bruenn, Moravia. Other naturalists corroborated his findings, experimenting with fowls, mice, guinea pigs, and other animals, eventually finding the same rules underlying the family trees of man (for example, the heavy underlip of the members of the House of Hapsburg; color-blindness, etc.). For this reason, I ask my readers to patiently follow my discourse, even though my investigations may strike one as being rather odd and dry, inasmuch as they are conducted on livi...Read More