NEW LIGHT ON HEREDITY

Evening Star, Issue 18690, 19 July 1924, Page 9

NEW LIGHT ON HEREDITY

Sir James Crichton-Browne, in taking the chair at tho educational congress on the Monteseori method at the Imperial Exhibition at Wembley, pointed out (the ' Morning Post ’ records) that recent experiments had demonstrated that acquired characters might be transmitted and that the Montessori training of the senses might prove helpful to tho children of the children on whom It was bestowed. Pavlov, tho great Russian physiologist, who had braved the brutal Bolshevist in their demands and fearlessly denounced the infamous system, which was producing in every town of Russia hordes of vagrant, homcieos, criminal, and diseased children, had shown that by functional exercise certain changes might bo stamped on the nervous system and become hereditary. He trained a group of white n ice to run to their feeding-place on the tinging of an electric bell, and found that 500 lessons were required in the first instance to accustom the mice to run to the feeding spot when they heard the bell ring. But in mice bred from the mice thus trained a much higher aptitude was displayed, for only 100 lessons wore necessary to obtain the same result. Tho third generation required only thirty lessons, and the fourth only ten. The last generation on which Pavlov had reported learned their lesson after only five repetitions, and ho had hope that the sixth generation. or one still later, would run to the feeding-place on the first occasion of hearing the bell. Very significant and hopeful are those experiments in relation to Dm influence of training, education, discipline in moulding and modifying tho higher nerve centres, said Sir James. Very encouraging should they bo to Dr Montessori and other disciples, who may pursue their labors feeling that they are conferring benefits more far-reaching than they had hitherto believed, and are benefiting the race as well as the individual child.