Dr. J. G. Adami in 1918 published the Croonian Lectures, delivered by him in 1917 under the title 'Adaptation and Disease,' together with reprints of previous papers, in a volume entitled _Medical Contributions to the Study of Evolution_. In this work (footnote, p. 71) the author claims that he preceded Professor Yves Delage by some two years in offering a physico-chemical hypothesis in place of determinants, and also asserts that 'the conclusions reached by him in 1901 regarding metabolites and, as we subsequently became accustomed to term them, hormones, and their influence on the germ-cells, have since been enunciated by Heape, Bourne, Cunningham, MacBride, and Dendy, although in each case without note of his (Adami's) earlier contribution.' These somewhat extensive claims deserve careful and impartial examination. The paper to which Dr. Adami refers was an Annual Address to the Brooklyn Medical Club, published in the _New York Medical Journal_ and the _British Medical Journal_ in 1901, and entitled 'On Theories of Inheritance, with special reference to Inheritance of Acquired Conditions in Man.' The belief that this paper had two years' priority over the volume of Delage entitled _L'Hérédité_ appears to have arisen from the fact that Adami consulted the bibliographical list in Thomson's compilation, _Heredity_ 1908, where the date of Delage's work is as 1903. But this was the second edition, the first having been published, as quoted above, in 1895, six years before the paper by Adami. Next, with regard to the claim that Adami's views as stated in the paper to which he refers were essentially the same as those brought forward by myself and others many years later, we find on reading the paper that its author discussed merely the effect of toxins in disease upon the body-cells and the germ-cells, causing in the offspring either various forms of arrested and imperfect development or some degree of immunity. In the latter case he argues that the action of the toxin of the disease has been to set up certain molecular changes, certain alterations in the composition of the cell-substance so that the latter responds in a different manner when again brought into contact with the toxin. Once this modification in the cell-substance is produced the descendants of this cell retain the same properties, although not permanently. Inheritance of the acquired condition has to be granted, he says, in the case of the body-cells in such cases. But this is not the question: inheritance in the proper sense of the word means the transmission to individuals of the next generation.