340 SAMl'EL W T TLEU AM) MEMORY THEORIES 



old, and as imbued with an intense though unconscious 

 memory of all that it has done sufficiently often to have 

 made a permanent impression ; if this be so, \ve can answer 

 the above questions perfectly well. The creature goes 

 through so many intermediate stages between its earliest 

 state as life at all, and its latest development, for the simplest 

 of all reasons, namely, because this is the road by which it 

 has always hitherto travelled to its present differentiation ; 

 this is the road it knows, and into every turn and up or down 

 of which it has been guided by the force of circumstances 

 and the balance of considerations " (pp. 125-6). 



The hypothesis explains also the way in which the 

 orderly succession of stages in embryogeny is brought about, 

 for we can readily understand that the embryo will not 

 remember any stage until it has passed through the stage 

 immediately preceding it. " Each step of normal develop- 

 ment will lead the impregnated ovum up to, and remind it 

 of, its next ordinary course of action, in the same way as we, 

 when we recite a well-known passage, are led up to each 

 successive sentence by the sentence which has immediately 

 preceded it. ... Though the ovum immediately after 

 impregnation is instinct with all the memories of both 

 parents, not one of these memories can normally become 

 active till both the ovum itself and its surroundings are 

 sufficiently like what they respectively were, when the 

 occurrence now to be remembered last took place. The 

 memory will then immediately return, and the creature will 

 do as it did on the last occasion that it was in like case as 

 now. This ensures that similarity of order shall be preserve 1 

 in all the stages of development in successive generations " 

 (pp. 297-8). 



Abnormal conditions of development will cause the 

 embryo to pause and hesitate, as if at a loss what to do, 

 having no ancestral experience to guide it. Abnormalities 

 of development represent the embryo's attempt to make the 

 best of an unexpected situation. Or, as Butler puts it, 

 " When . . . events are happening to it which, if it has the 

 kind <>f memory we art attributing to it, would baffle that 

 memory, or which have rarely or never been included in the 

 category of its recollections, // acts precise/} 1 .-/.v </ crcnhirc nets 



