The recognition of Evolution as the mode by which the human race came into existence has reacted in various ways on conceptions of education. In recent years, the study of the nature of variation and heredity (known as Genetics), the phenomena by which we must suppose Evolution to proceed, has made rapid progress. The knowledge thus acquired limits in several ways our expectations as to the results which education can attain. That education can modify the composition and development of such a people as our own is not in doubt; but even the preliminary acquaintance with what may be called racial physiology (recently acquired) has greatly promoted an understanding both of the possibilities of modification and of the way in which these changes are actually effected by the institution of public education. The conclusions to which genetic science points run counter to many notions long popularly entertained. It was, for example, assumed both by physiologists and by laymen that the effects of cultivation or training in the case of both animals and plants were, in greater or less degree, transmitted to the offspring, and that in the course of generations these effects would accumulate. This theory was prominently developed by Lamarck, and was adopted, with few exceptions (e.g. Sir W. Lawrence), by all writers on these subjects, notably by Charles Darwin. Weismann was the first to induce the world seriously to examine the foundations of this doctrine.