Part 14 (2/2)

”It seems to me,” he says, ”easy to understand how survival of the fittest may result in progress starting from such functionally produced gains, but impossible to understand how it could result in progress if it had to start in mere accidental structural increments due to spontaneous variation alone.” {252a}

Mr. Allen may say this now, but until lately he has been among the first to scold any one else who said so.

And this is how the article concludes:--

”The first hypothesis (Mr Darwin's) is one that throws no light upon any of the facts. The second hypothesis (which Mr. Allen is pleased to call Mr. Herbert Spencer's) is one that explains them all with transparent lucidity.” {252b}

So that Mr. Darwin, according to Mr. Allen, is clean out of it. Truly when Mr. Allen makes stepping-stones of his dead selves, he jumps upon them to some tune. But then Mr. Darwin is dead now. I have not heard of his having given Mr. Allen any ma.n.u.scripts as he gave Mr. Romanes. I hope Mr. Herbert Spencer will not give him any. If I was Mr. Spencer and found my admirers crowning me with Lamarck's laurels, I think I should have something to say to them.

What are we to think of a writer who declares that the theory that specific and generic changes are due to use and disuse ”explains _all the facts_ with transparent lucidity”?

Lamarck's hypothesis is no doubt a great help and a great step toward Professor Hering's; it makes a known cause underlie variations, and thus is free from those fatal objections which Professor Mivart and others have brought against the theory of Messrs. Darwin and Wallace; but how does the theory that use develops an organism explain why offspring repeat the organism at all? How does the Lamarckian hypothesis explain the sterility of hybrids, for example? The sterility of hybrids has been always considered one of the great _cruces_ in connection with any theory of Evolution. How again does it explain reversion to long-lost characters and the resumption of feral characteristics? the phenomena of old age? the principle that underlies longevity? the reason why the reproductive system is generally the last to arrive at maturity, and why few further developments take place in any organism after this has been fully developed? the sterility of many animals under captivity? the development in both males and females, under certain circ.u.mstances, of the characteristics of the opposite s.e.x? the latency of memory? the unconsciousness with which we develop, and with which instinctive actions are performed? How does any theory advanced either by Lamarck, Mr.

Herbert Spencer, or Mr. Darwin explain, or indeed throw light upon these facts until supplemented with the explanation given of them in Life and Habit--for which I must refer the reader to that work itself?

People may say what they like about ”the experience of the race,” {254a} ”the registration of experiences continued for numberless generations,”

{254b} ”infinity of experiences,” {254c} ”lapsed intelligence,” &c., but until they make Memory, in the most uncompromising sense of the word, the key to all the phenomena of Heredity, they will get little help to the better understanding of the difficulties above adverted to. Add this to the theory of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, and the points which I have above alluded to receive a good deal of ”lucidity.”

But to return to Mr. Romanes: however much he and Mr. Allen may differ about the merits of Mr. Darwin, they were at any rate not long since cordially agreed in vilipending my unhappy self, and are now saying very much what I have been saying for some years past. I do not deny that they are capable witnesses. They will generally see a thing when a certain number of other people have come to do so. I submit that, no matter how grudgingly they give their evidence, the tendency of that evidence is sufficiently clear to show that the opinions put forward in Life and Habit, Evolution, Old and New, and Unconscious Memory, deserve the attention of the reader.

I may perhaps deal with Mr. Romanes' recent work more fully in the sequel to Life and Habit on which I am now engaged. For the present it is enough to say that if he does not mean what Professor Hering and, _longo intervallo_, myself do, he should not talk about habit or experience as between successive generations, and that if he does mean what we do--which I suppose he does--he should have said so much more clearly and consistently than he has.

POSTSCRIPT.

This afternoon (March 7, 1884), the copies of this book being ready for issue, I see Mr. Romanes' letter to the _Athenaeum_ of this day, and get this postscript pasted into the book after binding.

Mr. Romanes corrects his reference to the pa.s.sage in which he says that Canon Kingsley first advanced the theory that instinct is inherited memory (”M. E. in Animals,” p. 296). Canon Kingsley's words are to be found in _Fraser_, June, 1867, and are as follows:--

”Yon wood-wren has had enough to make him sad, if only he recollects it, and if he can recollect his road from Morocco hither he maybe recollects likewise what happened on the road: the long weary journey up the Portuguese coast, and through the gap between the Pyrenees and the Jaysquivel, and up the Landes of Bordeaux, and through Brittany, flitting by night and hiding and feeding as he could by day; and how his mates flew against the lighthouses and were killed by hundreds, and how he essayed the British Channel and was blown back, shrivelled up by bitter blasts; and how he felt, nevertheless, that 'that was water he must cross,' he knew not why; but something told him that his mother had done it before him, and he was flesh of her flesh, life of her life, and had inherited her instinct (as we call hereditary memory in order to avoid the trouble of finding out what it is and how it comes). A duty was laid on him to go back to the place where he was bred, and now it is done, and he is weary and sad and lonely, &c. &c.

This is a very interesting pa.s.sage, and I am glad to quote it; but it hardly amounts to advancing the theory that instinct is inherited memory.

Observing Mr. Romanes' words closely, I see he only says that Canon Kingsley was the first to advance the theory ”that many hundred miles of landscape scenery” can ”const.i.tute an object of inherited memory;” but as he proceeds to say that ”_this_” has since ”been independently suggested by several writers,” it is plain he intends to convey the idea that Canon Kingsley advanced the theory that instinct generally is inherited memory, which indeed his words do; but it is hardly credible that he should have left them where he did if he had realized their importance.

Mr. Romanes proceeds to inform me personally that the reference to ”Nature” in his proof ”originally indicated another writer who had independently advanced the same theory as that of Canon Kingsley.” After this I have a right to ask him to tell me who the writer is, and where I shall find what he said. I ask this, and at my earliest opportunity will do my best to give this writer, too, the credit he doubtless deserves.

I have never professed to be the originator of the theory connecting heredity with memory. I knew I knew so little that I was in great trepidation when I wrote all the earlier chapters of ”Life and Habit.” I put them paradoxically, because I did not dare to put them otherwise. As the book went on, I saw I was on firm ground, and the paradox was dropped. When I found what Professor Hering had done, I put him forward as best I could at once. I then learned German, and translated him, giving his words in full in ”Unconscious Memory;” since then I have always spoken of the theory as Professor Hering's.

Mr. Romanes says that ”the theory in question forms the backbone of all the previous literature on instinct by the above-named writers (not to mention their numerous followers) and is by all of them elaborately stated as clearly as any theory can be stated in words.” Few except Mr.

Romanes will say this. I grant it ought to have formed the backbone ”of all previous literature on instinct by the above-named writers,” but when I wrote ”Life and Habit” it was not understood to form it. If it had been, I should not have found it necessary to come before the public this fourth time during the last seven years to insist upon it. Of course the theory is not new--it was in the air and bound to come; but when it came, it came through Professor Hering of Prague, and not through those who, great as are the services they have rendered, still did not render this particular one of making memory the keystone of their system. Mr.

Romanes now says: ”Why, of course, that's what they were meaning all the time.” Perhaps they were, but they did not say so, and others--conspicuously Mr. Romanes himself--did not understand them to be meaning what he now discovers that they meant. When Mr. Romanes attacked me in _Nature_, January 27, 1881, he said I had ”been antic.i.p.ated by Professor Hering,” but he evidently did not understand that any one else had antic.i.p.ated me; and far from holding, as he now does, that ”the theory in question forms the backbone of all the previous” writers on instinct, and ”is by all of them elaborately stated as clearly as any theory can be stated in words,” he said (in a pa.s.sage already quoted) that it was ”interesting, if advanced merely as an ill.u.s.tration, but to imagine that it maintains any truth of profound significance, or that it can possibly be fraught with any benefit to science, is absurd.”

Considering how recently Mr. Romanes wrote the words just quoted, he has soon forgotten them.

I do not, as I have said already, and never did, claim to have originated the theory I put forward in ”Life and Habit.” I thought it out independently, but I knew it must have occurred to many, and had probably been worked out by many, before myself. My claim is to have brought it perhaps into fuller light, and to have dwelt on its importance, bearings, and developments with some persistence, and to have done so without much recognition or encouragement, till lately. Of men of science, Mr. A. R.

Wallace and Professor Mivart gave me encouragement, but no one else has done so. I sometimes saw, as in the Duke of Argyll's case, and in Mr.

Romanes' own, that men were writing at me, or borrowing from me, but with the two exceptions already made, and that also of the Bishop of Carlisle, not one of the literary and scientific notables of the day so much as mentioned my name while making use of my work.

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