A vital conception of Evolution would have taught Weismann that
biological problems are not to be solved by assaults on mice. The
scientific form of his experiment would have been something like this.
First, he should have procured a colony of mice highly susceptible to
hypnotic suggestion. He should then have hypnotized them into an
urgent conviction that the fate of the musque world depended on
the disappearance of its tail, just as some ancient and forgotten
experimenter seems to have convinced the cats of the Isle of Man. Having
thus made the mice desire to lose their tails with a life-or-death
intensity, he would very soon have seen a few mice born with little or
no tail. These would be recognized by the other mice as superior
beings, and privileged in the division of food and in sexual selection.
Ultimately the tailed mice would be put to death as monsters by their
fellows, and the miracle of the tailless mouse completely achieved.
The objection to this experiment is not that it seems too funny to be
taken seriously, and is not cruel enough to overawe the mob, but simply
that it is impossible because the human experimenter cannot get at the
mouse's mind.
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