we not assume a similar process to have occurred with the eyes of insectivorous birds to whom a microscopic search for insects becomes a necessity of life; whilst the soaring Vulture has developed a long-sightedness which enables it, if not to see the quarry, at all events to discern its distant companion descending to the same. We have said we may be accused of Lamarckism, because it does not seem to be allowed by many of the followers of Weismann that an acquired character may be capable of being perpetuated and accentuated by the action of "Natural Selection."[1]
As with insects, we know little of the sight perceptions of other and much more highly developed animals. When in South Africa, I kept a young Baboon, who seemed pleased, at the decline of day, to mount a low roof, and watch the setting sun. I gazed at the same, but did we both see a similar appearance?[2] Turner could see and paint a sunset unappreciable by the senses of ordinary men who possess similar organs of sense. What did my Baboon see as he gazed in the same direction as myself? The question seems unanswerable. Could it have faithfully drawn and painted what it saw, such a picture could only appear to my senses as an exact representation of what I now see, and
- ↑ H.M. Bernard has apparently used a similar argument for "the transmission of acquired characters by inheritance, this inheritance coming in as a natural term at the end of a long series of individual acquirements" ('Nature,' vol. I. p. 546).
- ↑ According to Topinard, "the organ of vision is similar in man, the anthropoid apes, the pithecians, and the cebians" ('Anthropology,' p. 95).
Essays,' vol. ii. p. 11). And again he remarks:—"The Lamarckian hypothesis has long since been justly condemned, and it is the established practice for every tyro to raise his heel against the carcase of the dead lion" (ibid. p. 12). When the devoted disciples of Weismann, aghast at the least argument for some amount of direct environmental change or inheritance of acquired character, raise the cry of "Lamarckism," we are reminded of the XXXII controversial stratagem described by Schopenhauer:—"If you are confronted with an assertion, there is a short way of getting rid of it, or, at any rate, of throwing suspicion on it, by putting it into some odious category; even though the connection is only apparent, or else of a loose character. You can say, for instance, 'That is Manichæism,' or 'It is Arianism,' or 'Pelagianism,' or 'Idealism,' or 'Spinozism,' or 'Pantheism,' or 'Brownianism,' or 'Naturalism,' or 'Atheism,' or 'Rationalism,' 'Spiritualism,' 'Mysticism,' and so on" ('The Art of Controversy,' Bailey Saunder's transl. pp. 41–2).
