The German zoologist August Weismann uses the seasonal forms of butterflies and the stripes and spots of caterpillars to test the theory of descent. He asks how such markings arise and change, what they reveal about heredity and natural selection, and whether evolution needs any purposive force at all. Charles Darwin contributed the prefatory notice to Raphael Meldola’s translation.
A landmark of evolutionary biology from the scientist who later founded the germ-plasm theory of heredity. Download the free EPUB.