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And then cry 'Hold-jee'

For the great old horse to move on

To the next lot of sheaves?

Do you remember the rise of the shafts

Beneath our sand-shoes,

And the feel of the buckles and straps of the harness

Digging into our bare legs

As the cart moved on?

You used to wear a little sunbonnet

From which your black curly hair overflowed

And blossomed about your warm cheeks;

And sometimes, impatient, you'd push it back,
And shake your curls out free

In the wind and the sun.

And when we were astride the horse together

You used to put your arms round me

And laugh over my shoulder;

I could feel your breath on my cheek

And your hair, tickling.

And then I used to feel what a man I was

To do great and adventurous things

In the years to come

Do you remember old Father John,

Thigh-deep at the top of the great stack,
With the harvest moon at the full
Swinging up out of the deepening skies
Behind him

And still the huge waggons lumbering up below

With their burden of golden grain

To be pitched on top,

And the ceaseless rustle and whisper of corn,

And lads' voices and laughter

Through the moonlit dusk?

We used to leave them there,

And wonder how long they'd work on into the night,

By the gleam of the moon.

We used to leave them there

And run home down the darkening lanes,

With our shadows flitting in front of us

And the whisper of bats' wings above.
Do you remember?

NOTES FROM A FRONT-PAGE LABORATORY

BY SIMEON STRUNSKY

Newts and Salamanders. PAUL KAMMERER is a Viennese biologist who is now engaged in defending the doctrines of Lamarck against seemingly overwhelming odds. Nearly one hundred and twenty-five years ago Lamarck believed that one potent factor in the transformation of species was the inheritance of acquired characteristics. New traits developed by one generation under the stress of use or disuse or some other environmental force might be transmitted to succeeding generations, along with traits inherited from the very beginnings of life. So Lamarck. The doctrine became scientific heresy when August Weismann, a human generation ago, proved, or is believed to have proved, that nothing ever gets itself transmitted from father to son which the father in turn has not inherited. One might say that until recently Lamarck was disproved by himself. His doctrines failed to be transmitted to succeeding generations.

Now comes Kammerer and asserts that he has demonstrated the inheritance of acquired traits. He has changed the color of salamanders by breeding generations of them against a differently tinted background. He has adapted land lizards to a marine environment. He has taken newts in whom the eye, from disuse in the dark, had become filmed over and sunken into the skull socket, and by exposing them to the light has bred newts in whom the eye has pierced forward into prominence.

I

Kammerer's conclusions have been received with skepticism by the scientific world as known to the Anglo-Saxon. In the first place, he has been told that his experiments must be duplicated and verified by other observers. In the second place, it is a question whether his newts and lizards, even if they have changed as Kammerer says they have, will stay put, or whether some day Kammerer will not find himself confronted with a startling reversion of his newts and salamanders to the original type. It would appear that man is not the only backslider in the world of animate nature. And thus the controversy moves merrily on.

Serajevo and Versailles. Suppose, then, that we leave this conflict between environmental change and the predetermined plasm to be fought out in the laboratory tanks and cages, while we look about for the test of Lamarckism in the world as known to the man in the street, with a newspaper. This being very soon after the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of the World War, we might look back to the summer of 1914 and later. Here it is immediately manifest that the evidence is strongly against Lamarck. The story of the last ten years shows, at first sight, that acquired characteristics decidedly are not transmitted.

Of the Great War, it is frequently and correctly said that it vindicated, in tragic form, the principle of primal heredity. The war showed that man in

1914 was still very much the heir of traits imbedded in the germ plasm of millions of years ago. The war showed that our celebrated 'human nature' has been transmitted through the ages virtually unaffected by the acquired characteristics of civilization. The war was a conflict of age-old passions, competitions, frontiers, manifest destinies, spheres of interest, and white man's burdens of all sorts. Man, in the course of the centuries, had acquired many characteristics. He had acquired peace societies, Red Cross societies, international Socialism, international scientific congresses, exchange professors, arbitration courts, international finance, humanitarianism, safeguards for women and children, and many other pleasing traits which, by continuous use, were expected to transform the human species. And then came a sudden outburst of poison gas and submarine sinkings to show how easily the acquired characteristic of many years could be sloughed off under the impact of a violent selfassertion of the primal germ.

The war produced some extraordinary examples of reversion to type. Take, for instance, the case of Poland. Between the years 1772 and 1793 Poland had ceased to be an individual entity and had become the acquired characteristic of no less than three other individuals Russia, Prussia, and Austria. For nearly one hundred and fifty years, the czars continued to transmit Warsaw to their heirs as an acquired characteristic. Hapsburg continued to transmit Cracow to Hapsburg as an acquired characteristic. Hohenzollern

continued to transmit Posen and Danzig to Hohenzollern as acquired characteristics. By 1914, it was pretty generally assumed that this acquired Polish trait had become an integral part of the Romanoff, Hapsburg, and Hohenzollern germ plasm, destined to run on in these best families forever. Five years later

this

great Lamarckian process was completely undone. Russia, Prussia, and Austria have lost their acquired Polish traits as decisively as Kammerer's opponents say his newts and lizards may find themselves stripped of their acquired 'foreign' traits.

And elsewhere in the world's geography the same anti-Lamarckian process has been manifesting itself. The acquired characteristics of the Ottoman Turk in Arabia, Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia have disappeared. Japan has lost her acquired characteristics in Shantung. Hungary has sloughed off all her Slav taxpayer characteristics. The Egyptian traits are fading out of the British Empire; and things are stirring in India.

Low Acquisibility. Even more notable have been the anti-Lamarckian effects of the war in the economic-biologic sphere. Here we have to do with the most celebrated of all acquired characteristics—namely, Wealth or Property. Wealth is the one characteristic which men have always set out deliberately to acquire. In this respect, property would even out-Lamarck Lamarck. The salamander does not say to himself, 'Go to, I will migrate from a brightgreen to a soft-yellow environment in order to acquire a lovely lemon tinge for my posterity.' For that matter, not even man, the self-conscious one, has ever said, 'I will now proceed to develop an exceptionally spatulated thumb or supernormal power of eyesight for the benefit of my grandchildren.' If these things happen, they do just that: they happen. There is no conscious purpose behind it. But in the matter of bank stock and railway bonds and real-estate mortgages a man does consciously strive for an acquired characteristic. And what is more, he is eager to acquire that characteristic for the very purpose, mainly, of transmitting it.

And not only in the sense of being

highly transmissible has private property, hitherto, been true to Lamarck. Broader than the principle of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is the Lamarckian principle of functional use and disuse as factors in the evolution of species. If a newt uses its eye steadily and purposefully, that eye develops in scope and power. If a newt uses its eye ill, that eye atrophies. So with wealth. Suppose John Smith has acquired a million dollars in the course of his lifetime and has transmitted that valuable characteristic to his son. If John Smith 2nd makes proper use of that million-dollar characteristic, the chances are that it will manifest itself in the third John Smith in the form of a five-million-dollar trait. On the other hand, successive generations, by improper use of a transmitted million-dollar trait, or a fivemillion-dollar trait, or even an eightymillion-dollar trait, may lose that trait altogether and revert to the original state of the original John Smith before he began acquiring Dun and Bradstreet characteristics. This Lamarckian truth has been summed up in the familiar remark that in this country it is usually three generations from overalls to overalls.

Society has looked with extreme favor upon the Lamarckian conception of property. Society has encouraged the transmission of property from generation to generation. Indeed, there is a very respectable body of opinion which holds that property is the basis of the social order; and the right to property obviously means not only the right to accumulate and possess, but the right to transmit. There is no need here to discuss all the historic codes and laws of inheritance which until recently were designed to reënforce a biological principle with a social sanction. This sanction finds its fullest development in the laws of entail and primogeniture, by which individuals are actually deprived

of the right to dictate the specific channel along which their acquired realestate characteristics shall be transmitted. The individual was compelled to let his acquired traits flow along the channels deemed most desirable from the point of view of the social interest. England to-day is frequently considered to be what it is because of the laws that encouraged real-estate transmission to the eldest son, leaving for the younger sons the army, the church, or the colonies. In France, on the other hand, the Code Napoléon decreed that a man's landed-property characteristics should be distributed equally among all his children; and France's sturdy peasant proprietorship to-day is usually traced to this popularization of Lamarck by Bonaparte.

The Weismannian Tax-Collector. But there has been a change. Why are the people of the United States, at the moment of this writing, more deeply concerned with the problem of tax-reduction than with any other question of general interest? Why is this also true of the people of Great Britain, of Italy, and of the greater part of the civilized and tax-paying world? Because something happened a few years ago which largely destroyed the Lamarckian character of property, and tax-reduction is a desperate endeavor on the part of the world's population to get back to Lamarck. That something was the World War. Wealth emerged out of the war, with anywhere from thirty to one hundred per cent of its transmissible qualities destroyed. The normal citizen can no longer transmit property to his descendants as readily as he used to do, for the very good reason that his Government takes a very large part of his property away from him, and leaves him with that much less to transmit. For many millions of people in Europe the war left nothing at all to transmit. The struggle to get back from war-taxes to

normal taxes, to get back from Weismann to Lamarck, will be in the forefront for a great many years to come in every civilized country or at least in every country sufficiently civilized to have participated in the World War.

Great Britain is to-day the most antiLamarckian nation on earth. The subjects of King George hand over more of their acquired property characteristics to the tax-collector than do any other participants in the World War. British inheritance taxes mount as high as forty per cent, meaning that this portion of a defunct British citizen's property has been rendered untransmissible. And it is not merely succession taxes. The normal taxes paid by the British citizen average one third of his annual income. This means that, for a very considerable portion of the British middle-class, wealth has virtually ceased to be hereditary. The business of making both ends meet is so difficult that there can be little question of saving for one's heirs. England to-day expects every man to do his duty by the tax-collector six times as hard as before the war; and to that extent one's duty by one's heirs must suffer.

In other countries the loss of the transmissible character of property has been somewhat less notable, but still enormous when compared with the pre-war standard of taxation. In France, perhaps twenty per cent of an individual's income is rendered unavailable for transmission to the next generation, by the activities of the tax-collector. In the United States it is ten per cent, on the average. Federal taxation to-day is probably five times as high as before the war.

What is the justification for wartaxes? In the first place, of course, necessity. But in many quarters there has been an attempt to moralize the process. It is a familiar argument. The State, in the course of the war, had ex

ercised the right to conscript the bodies of its citizens together with their freedom of opinion, of utterance, and of movement, and various other normally inalienable characteristics. Therefore, it is argued, Government should have no hesitation about conscripting the wealth of its citizens to pay for the war. In the course of the war, millions of young men were deprived of the power to transmit to their issue, not only their acquired characteristics, but all characteristics whatsoever, by the simple fact of dying on the field of battle or in the hospitals and the prison camps. Young men were killed who might have transmitted to their unborn children a vast accumulation of energy, aptitude, genius, aspirations, dreams. It is only just, it is argued, that the survivors should deny themselves, to a considerable extent, the privilege of transmitting their property accumulations to their children. If it is to be Weismann against Lamarck, then it should be Weismann all round. So runs the argument. Its soundness may be left for the reader to pass upon.

On the Other Hand. But in society, as in the biological sciences, it is a very rare principle that enjoys smooth sailing. Hypotheses have a disconcerting way of running up smack against an obstinate set of hostile facts. So in this after-war world and on this issue of private property, where everything has seemingly been running against Lamarck, we find ourselves suddenly confronted with a very startling vindication of Lamarck. I have been pointing out how much more difficult war has rendered the inheritance of the most popular of all acquired characteristics, namely, wealth. In all fairness, it should now be pointed out that in one respect Lamarck has been very emphatically justified; that, as a result of the war, wealth has been more rapidly and more thoroughly transmitted from individual

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