"Natural selection does not and cannot produce new species or varieties
or cause modifications of living organisms to come into existence. On
the contrary, its sole function is to prevent evolution. In its action
it is destructive merely,--not constructive,--causing death and
extinction, not life and progression. Death cannot produce life; and
though natural selection may produce the death of the unfit, it cannot
produce the fit, far less evolve the fittest. It may permit the fit to
survive by not killing them off, if they are already in existence; but
it does not bring them into being, or produce improvement in them after
they have once appeared."[24]

[Footnote 24: _World's Work_, December, 1913, p. 177.]

Opposing these Neo-Lamarckians were such prominent scientists as August
Weismann, A.R. Wallace, E. Ray Lankester, who strenuously opposed the
idea that "acquired characters," or more precisely _parental
experience_, are ever transmissible. In the subsequent years the
greatest variety of experimental tests have been applied to secure the
hereditary transmission of any sort of such acquired characters, with
uniformly negative results. One of the most elaborate of these
experiments was conducted by a German botanist, who transplanted 2,500
different kinds of mountain plants to the lowlands, where he studied
them for several years alongside their relatives, natives of these
lowlands. He found that their mountain environment had made absolutely
no permanent change in their structures or habits, which soon conformed
exactly with those of their relatives which had lived in the lowland
environment for centuries. Many similar efforts have been made to
confirm this doctrine of the transmission of acquired characters; but
their universal failure is like that of mechanics in trying to invent
perpetual motion.