"
Mr. Romanes is here intending what the reader will find insisted on on p.
98 of the present volume; but how difficult he has made what could have
been said intelligibly enough, if there had been nothing but the reader's
comfort to be considered. Unfortunately that seems to have been by no
means the only thing of which Mr. Romanes was thinking, or why, after
implying and even saying over and over again that instinct is inherited
habit due to inherited memory, should he turn sharply round on p. 297 and
praise Mr. Darwin for trying to snuff out "the well-known doctrine of
inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck"? The answer is not far to seek.
It is because Mr. Romanes did not merely want to tell us all about
instinct, but wanted also, if I may use a homely metaphor, to hunt with
the hounds and run with the hare at one and the same time.
I remember saying that if the late Mr. Darwin "had told us what the
earlier evolutionists said, why they said it, wherein he differed from
them, and in what way he proposed to set them straight, he would have
taken a course at once more agreeable with usual practice, and more
likely to remove misconception from his own mind and from those of his
readers." {239} This I have no doubt was one of the passages which made
Mr. Romanes so angry with me. I can find no better words to apply to Mr.
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