278 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
D.
H. Scott, late Honorary Director of the Research Laboratory, Kew Gardens, and
President of the Linnean Society, London. Its title is “ The Evolution of
Plants,” and on p. 224 one may read “Negative evidence can never be conclusive.”
This dictum applies to the adverse reports of Bainbridge, the official
cancer-researchers, and, in fine, all who have condemned the enzyme treatment.
Another good example is furnished by the
controversy—now some quarter of a century old—in both botany and zoology, as to
the inheritance or non-inheritance of characters acquired by the individual.
Weismann, for one, has carried out elaborate experiments to refute this
supposed inheritance of acquired characters, but all with negative results. As
a fact, the doctrine finds its strongest support in botany, where it has been
overlooked that this apparent inheritance of such characters was confined to
the asexual generations, in which, if the term “individual” be used, it must
apply to all the products, asexually produced, of one plant—that is, in this
sense they would all form a single individual. The doctrine of the inheritance
of acquired characters is refuted by the positive finds of embryology, which
show, under an actual tangible continuity of germ-cells, that nothing at all is
handed on from parent to offspring. As this is the case, nothing acquired by
the parent can be inherited. That is, there is in the sexual generations of
animals no such thing as an inheritance of acquired characters.