The Inheritance of Acquired Characters in Alytes

FOR those who are not concerned with the details of this debate I suppose that the critical sentence in Dr. Kammerer's letter (NATURE, August 18) is that in which he expresses himself as follows: ``I willingly admit that the traditional explanation of the pads, namely, that they are produced by friction with the skin of the female, may possibly be a fable,'' adding references to passages in which he had already discussed alternative hypotheses. But those alternatives were ultimately rejected, and his final judgment was that until the assumption that the pads arise through functional adaptation can be replaced by a better, it remains the only acceptable account.¹ Remarking that the alleged nuptial pads may possibly be due directly to life in water and not an adaptative response, he now tells us that the relevance of his observation to the theory of heredity is in either alternative the same But is it ?