The following essay was my inaugural lecture as Pro-Rector of the University of Freiburg, and was delivered publicly in the hall of the University, on June 21, 1883; it first appeared in print in the following August. Only a few copies of the first edition were available for the public, and it is therefore now reprinted as a second edition, which only differs from the first in a few not unimportant improvements and additions.

The title which I have chosen requires some explanation. I do not propose to treat of the whole problem of heredity, but only of a certain aspect of it—the transmission of acquired characters which has been hitherto assumed to occur. In taking this course I may say that it was impossible to avoid going back to the foundation of all the phenomena of heredity, and to determine the substance with which they must be connected. In my opinion this can only be the substance of the germ-cells; and this substance transfers its hereditary tendencies from generation to generation, at first unchanged, and always uninfluenced in any corresponding manner, by that which happens during the life of the individual which bears it. If these views, which are indicated rather than elaborated in this paper, be correct, all our ideas upon the transformation of species require thorough modification, for the whole principle of evolution by means of exercise (use and disuse), as proposed by Lamarck, and accepted in some cases by Darwin, entirely collapses.

The nature of the present paper—which is a lecture and not an elaborate treatise—necessitates that only suggestions and not an exhaustive treatment of the subject could be given. I have also abstained from giving further details in the form of an appendix, chiefly because I could hardly have attempted to complete a treatment of the whole range of the subject, and I hope to refer again to these questions in the future, when new experiments and observations have been made.

I am very glad to see that such an important authority as PflÜger^[33] has in the meantime come to the same opinion, from an entirely different direction—an opinion which forms the foundation of the views here brought forward, namely, that heredity depends upon the continuity of the molecular substance of the germ from generation to generation.