16 MAN THE ANIMAL 



his having done it once oftener than when he did it last. First 

 he will do his tadpoles by rote, so to speak, on his head, from 

 long practice J then he does his fish trick j then he grows arms 

 and legs, all unconsciously from the inveteracy of habit till 

 he comes to doing his man, and this lesson he has not yet 

 learnt so thoroughly. Some part of it, as the breathing and 

 oxidization business he is well up to, inasmuch as they form part 

 of previous roles, but the teeth and hair, the upright position, 

 the power of speech, though all tolerably familiar, give him 

 trouble — for he is very stupid, a regular dunce in fact. Then 

 comes his newer and more complex environment and this 

 puzzles him — arrests his attention — whereas consciousness 

 springs into existence, as a spark from a horse's hoof. 



"Thus we are all one animal, and reproduction and death are 

 phases of the ordinary waste and repair which go on in our 

 bodies daily." 



Considered as a theory of inheritance, which was Butler's 

 main interest in the whole business, all this is not only out of 

 date, but in fact never was in date. This is not merely because 

 it got no serious consideration from competent biologists, ex- 

 cept in a few instances. More generally it is because all theories 

 of heredity that have ever gained general acceptance, aside from 

 local national loyalty as in the case of Lamarck's, have been 

 atomistic doctrines, in which "little balls" or tiny "chemical 

 packets," in the germ cells are held to be the essential mecha- 

 nism by which inheritance is caused and controlled. But if we 

 confine attention to the biology of accumulating racial experi- 

 ence about physiological matters, such as heart beating and 

 breathing, the modern gene theory is inherently even funnier 

 as a rationalized explanation than old Butler's protoplasmic 

 memory based on unbroken protoplasmic continuity. 



But even supposing that Butler's theory of accumulating 

 racial experience were to be accepted at full face value it is 

 evident that it would be enormously inferior in precision and 

 comprehensiveness to written language and the printing press 

 as devices to achieve the same end. However one views the 



