Prometheus, or, biology and the advancement of man / by H.S. Jennings.

  • Herbert Spencer Jennings
Date:
[1925]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Prometheus, or, biology and the advancement of man / by H.S. Jennings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    BIOLOGICAL BACKGROUND as certainly due to the conditions of development as to the materials of the germ cells. If there were not practical difficulties in the way, similar fundamental changes of structure could be made in man or any of the higher animals. In these higher creatures, a time comes, before development stops, in which it is possible to change the conditions ; that is, after what we call birth. And then it is found that changing the conditions does change the characteristics that later develop—exactly as the characteristics of the fish are changed by changing the conditions. We call this process educa¬ tion. If we could give the same education for many generations to a number of different human families, we should find that the characteristics resulting from education are inherited [6i]