butcher's wife in the old catch. He got a colony of mice, and cut off
their tails. Then he waited to see whether their children would be born
without tails. They were not, as Butler could have told him beforehand.
He then cut off the children's tails, and waited to see whether the
grandchildren would be born with at least rather short tails. They were
not, as I could have told him beforehand. So with the patience and
industry on which men of science pride themselves, he cut off the
grandchildren's tails too, and waited, full of hope, for the birth of
curtailed great-grandchildren. But their tails were quite up to the
mark, as any fool could have told him beforehand. Weismann then gravely
drew the inference that acquired habits cannot be transmitted. And yet
Weismann was not a born imbecile. He was an exceptionally clever and
studious man, not without roots of imagination and philosophy in him
which Darwinism killed as weeds.

How was it that he did not see that he was not experimenting with habits
or characteristics at all? How had he overlooked the glaring fact that
his experiment had been tried for many generations in China on the feet
of Chinese women without producing the smallest tendency on their part
to be born with abnormally small feet? He must have known about the
bound feet even if he knew nothing of the mutilations, the clipped ears
and docked tails, practised by dog fanciers and horse breeders on many
generations of the unfortunate animals they deal in. Such amazing
blindness and stupidity on the part of a man who was naturally
neither blind nor stupid is a telling illustration of what Darwin
unintentionally did to the minds of his disciples by turning their
attention so exclusively towards the part played in Evolution by
accident and violence operating with entire callousness to suffering and
sentiment.