Over and over again Mr. Romanes insists that it is heredity which does
this or that. Thus it is "_heredity with natural selection which adapt_
the anatomical plan of the ganglia." {236b} It is heredity which
impresses nervous changes on the individual. {236c} "In the lifetime of
species actions originally intelligent may by frequent repetition _and
heredity_," &c. {236d}; but he nowhere tells us what heredity is any more
than Messrs. Herbert Spencer, Darwin, and Lewes have done. This,
however, is, exactly what Professor Hering, whom I have unwittingly
followed, does. He resolves all phenomena of heredity, whether in
respect of body or mind, into phenomena of memory. He says in effect, "A
man grows his body as he does, and a bird makes her nest as she does,
because both man and bird remember having grown body and made nest as
they now do, or very nearly so, on innumerable past occasions." He thus
reduces life from an equation of say 100 unknown quantities to one of 99
only by showing that heredity and memory, two of the original 100 unknown
quantities, are in reality part of one and the same thing.
That he is right Mr. Romanes seems to me to admit, though in a very
unsatisfactory way.
REMARKS ON MR. ROMANES' MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS--(_continued_).
I will give examples of my meaning. Mr.
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