Thus described, the field for consideration is very wide. Though the effects of changed conditions were especially studied in the hope of solving the problem of adaptation by direct observation, that, as all are now agreed, is but a part of a more general question. We must ask not only do changed conditions produce an _adaptative_ response on the part of the offspring, but whether they produce any response on the part of the offspring at all. It is not in doubt that by violent means, such as starvation or poisoning of the reproductive cells, effects of a kind, stunting and deformity for instance, can be made evident, just as similar effects may follow similar treatment during embryonic or larval life. Apart from interferences of this class, are there any that may be reasonably invoked as modifying the course of inheritance? No epitome of the older evidence for the inheritance of adaptative changes is here required. That has often been collected, especially by Weismann, who exposed its weaknesses so thoroughly as to carry conviction to most minds, and showed that whether the phenomenon occurs or not, no one can yet prove that it does. Belief in these transmissions, after being almost universally held, was with singular unanimity abandoned. This change in opinion, though doing credit to the faith of the scientific community in evidential reasoning, is the more remarkable inasmuch as the strength of the idea was not derived from the minute amounts of supposed facts now demolished. On the contrary, it was really an instinctive deduction from a wide superficial acquaintance with the properties of animals and plants. They _can_ accommodate themselves to circumstances. They _do_ make responses sometimes marvellously appropriate to demands for which they can scarcely have been prepared. What more natural than to suppose that the permanent adaptations have been achieved by inherited summation of such responses? No one had actually been driven to believe in the inheritance of adaptative changes because bitches which had been docked had been known to give birth to tailless puppies, or because certain wheat in Norway was alleged to have become acclimatized in a few generations. Evidence of this kind was collected and produced rather as an ornamental appendix to a proposition already accepted, and held to be plainly demonstrated by the facts of nature. Looked at indeed in that preliminary and uncritical way, the case is simply overwhelming. Those who desire to see how strong it is should turn to Samuel Butler's _Life and Habit_, and even if in reading they reiterate to themselves that no experimental evidence exists in support of the propositions advanced, the misgiving that none the less they may be true is likely to remain. Making every deduction for the fact that the wonders of adaptation have been grossly exaggerated, and that marvels of fitness and correspondence between means and ends have grown out of mere anthropomorphic speculations,