WEISMANN, AUGUST (1834 )

This article appears in Volume V28, Page 499 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: WAT-WIL

WEISMANN, AUGUST (1834 ) , German biologist, was born at Frankfort-on-Main, on the 17th of January 1834, and studied

medicine

MEDICINE

in Gottingen. After spending three years in

Rostock

ROSTOCK

, he visited successively Vienna (1858), Italy (1859) and Paris (186o), and from 1861 to 1862 he acted as private physician to the archduke Stephen of Austria at Schaumburg Palace. In 1863 he went to Giessen to devote himself to biological study under Leuckart, and in 1866 he was appointed extra-

ordinary

ORDINARY (med. Lat. ordinarius, Fr. ordinaire)

professor of

zoology

ZOOLOGY (from Gr. Nov, a living thing, and ?byos, theory)

at Freiburg, becoming

ordinary

ORDINARY (med. Lat. ordinarius, Fr. ordinaire)

professor a few years later. His earlier

work

WORK

was largely concerned with purely zoological investigations, one of his earliest works dealing with the development of the

Diptera

DIPTERA (Sir,
double
- DOUBLE
- DOUBLE (from the Mid. Eng. duble, the form which gives the present pronunciation, through the Old Er. duble, from Lat. duplus, twice as much)
, arepa, wings)

. Microscopical

work

WORK

, however, became impossible to him owing to impaired eyesight, and he turned his attention to wider problems of biological inquiry. Between 1868 and 1876 he published a

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of papers in which he attacked the question of the variability of organisms; these were published in an English

translation

TRANSLATION

by R. Meldola in 1882, under the title Studies in the Theories of Descent, Darwin himself contributing a

preface

PREFACE (Med. Lat. prefatia, for classical praefatio, praefari, to speak beforehand)

in which the importance of the nature and cause of variability in individuals was emphasized. Weismann's name, however, is best known as the author of the germ-plasm theory of heredity, with its accompanying denial of the transmission of acquired charactersa theory which on its publication met with consider-able opposition, especially in England, from orthodox Darwinism. A

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of essays in which this theory is expressed was collected and published in an English

translation

TRANSLATION

(Essays upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems, vol. i. 1889, vol. ii. 1892). Weismann published many other works devoted to the exposition of his biological views, among them being Die Dauer des Lebens; Vererbung; Ewigkeit des Lebens; Die Kontinuitat des Keimplasmas als Grundlage Liner Theorie der Vererbung; Das Keim-plasma; Die Allmacht der Naturzuchtung; Aussere Einflilsse als Entwicklungsreize; Neue Gedanken zur Vererbungsfrage, and Germinal-Selektion.
For an account of his doctrines the reader is referred to the articles on HEREDITY, REGENERATION and REPRODUCTION.

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