Mr. Spencer's explanation of the inheritance of the effects of use and
disuse (p. 36) is that "while generating a modified _consensus_ of
functions and of structures, the activities are at the same time
impressing this modified _consensus_ on the sperm-cells and germ-cells
whence future individuals are to be produced"--a proposition which reads
more like metaphysics than science. Difficult to understand or believe
in ordinary instances, such _consensus_-inheritance seems impossible in
cases like that of the hive-bee. Can we suppose that the _consensus_ of
the activities of the working bee impresses itself on the sperm-cells
of the drones and on the germ-cells of the carefully secluded queen?
Buechner thinks so, for he says: "Although the queens and drones do not
now work, yet the capacities inherited from earlier times still remain
to them, especially to the former, and are kept alive and fresh by the
impressions constantly made upon them during life, and they are thus in
a position to transmit them to posterity." Surely it is better to
abandon a cherished theory than to be compelled to defend it by
explanations which are as inconsistent as they are inadequate. New
capacities are developed as well as old ones kept fresh. The massacre or
expulsion of the drones would have to impress itself on the germ-cells
of an onlooking queen, and the imprisonment of the queen on the
sperm-cells of the drones--and in such a way, moreover, as to be
afterwards developed into action in the neuters only. And
use-inheritance all the while is being thoroughly overpowered by
impression-inheritance--by the full transmission of that which is merely
seen in others! If such a law prevails, one may feel cold because an
ancestor thought of the frosty Caucasus. None of this absurdity would
arise if it were clearly seen that a parent is only a trustee--that
transmission and development are perfectly distinct--that parental
modifications are irrelevant to those transmitted to offspring.