Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/341

Rh and this notwithstanding the fact that the logical outcome of such a belief should be a belief in evolution. Among biologists, even those who support the theory that acquired traits are not transmissible, do it in this instance haltingly, as though they were of the opinion that their position is here at its weakest. I have, with amazement, seen it argued that the apparent transmission of an acquired craving for alcohol is due to the circumstance that the drunkard's germ is bathed in alcohol, whereby it is habituated to it, i.e. whereby it, jiractically speaking, acquires a craving for alcohol, which is afterwards manifested in the individual into which it proliferates. But the craving for alcohol depends of course on consciousness, which in turn depends on the presence of nervous structures—at least we have no evidence that in the absence of nervous structures consciousness anywhere exists; for instance, in the protozoa and in plants. In the germ there are no nervous structures, and therefore, à priori, it can have no consciousness; à posteriori, we have no shadow of reason for supposing it has any, for supposing it thinks or feels more than a plant. The mere fact that it represents in the ontogeny a stage in the phylogeny when plant life had not diverged from animal life negatives the idea; as does also the fact, that consciousness would be utterly useless to it, and therefore, even had consciousness been present in its prototype of the phylogeny, that faculty would have undergone such retrogression in successive germs as long ago to become non-existent. It is not to be denied that the alcohol drunk by an intemperate person may affect his or her germs, possibly or probably in an injurious manner, but it is most strongly to be denied that the germs are so affected by alcohol as to cause them, after conjugation, to proliferate into organisms in which the craving for drink is greater than would otherwise have been the case.