216 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



material, the matter, which is handed down from generation 

 to generation as the basis of inheritance ? Weismann, as 

 we know, regarded it as a very complicated structure, part 

 of which by its disintegration became the foundation of 

 individual embryology. We have disproved, on the authority 

 of many facts, the latter part of this assumption; but of 

 course the first part of it may turn out to be true in spite 

 of this. We have no means at present to enable us to say 

 a priori anything positive or negative about the important 

 question of the nature of that matter, the continuity of which 

 in inheritance is in some sense a self-evident fact, and we 

 therefore shall postpone the answer until a later point of 

 our analytical discussion. 



ON CERTAIN THEORIES WHICH SEEK TO COMPARE 

 INHERITANCE TO MEMORY 



It will be advisable first to study some other theoretical 

 views which have been put forward with regard to in- 

 heritance. The physiologist Hering, as early as 1876, 

 compared all heredity to the well-known fact of memory, 

 assuming, so to say, a sort of remembrance of all that has 

 happened to the species in the continuity of its generations ; 

 and several German authors, especially Semon, have lately 

 made this hypothesis the basis of more detailed speculation. 



It is not clear, either from Bering's paper l or from 

 Semon's book, 2 what is really to be understood here by 

 the word " memory," and, of course, there might be under- 

 stood by it very different things, according to the author's 



1 Ueber das Geddchtnis als eine allgcmeine Function der organiscken 

 Materie, Wien, 1870. New edition in Klassiker d. exakt. Wiss., Leipzig, 

 Engelmann. 



2 Die Mneme, Leipzig, 1904. 



