"
A little lower Mr. Romanes says: "Of what kind, then, is the inherited
memory on which the young cuckoo (if not also other migratory birds)
depends? We can only answer, of the same kind, whatever this may be, as
that upon which the old bird depends." {235}
I have given above most of the more marked passages which I have been
able to find in Mr. Romanes' book which attribute instinct to memory, and
which admit that there is no fundamental difference between the kind of
memory with which we are all familiar and hereditary memory as
transmitted from one generation to another. But throughout his work
there are passages which suggest, though less obviously, the same
inference.
The passages I have quoted show that Mr. Romanes is upholding the same
opinions as Professor Hering's and my own, but their effect and tendency
is more plain here than in Mr. Romanes' own book, where they are overlaid
by nearly 400 long pages of matter which is not always easy of
comprehension.
The late Mr. Darwin himself, indeed--whose mantle seems to have fallen
more especially and particularly on Mr. Romanes--could not contradict
himself more hopelessly than Mr. Romanes often does. Indeed in one of
the very passages I have quoted in order to show that Mr. Romanes accepts
the phenomena of heredity as phenomena of memory, he speaks of "heredity
as playing an important part _in forming memory_ of ancestral
experiences;" so that whereas I want him to say that the phenomena of
heredity are due to memory, he will have it that the memory is due to the
heredity, {236a} which seems to me absurd.
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