ABSTRACT
The question which forms the title of this article will not, perhaps, strike the general reader who is unacquainted with recent developments of biology as being of much importance, or as having any special interest for the world at large. Darwin accepted the inheritance of such characters as an undoubted fact, though he did not attach much importance to it as an agent in evolution; and his theory of pangenesis was an attempt to explain the phenomena of heredity in accordance with it. In this chapter, the author propose to waste no time on the question whether mutilations are ever inherited, because both parties are now agreed that this is not the point at issue. Many writers have laid stress on the difficulty of accounting for the origination of new organs in certain groups of animals, by variation and natural selection alone.
