26 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



was averse to the vitalistic attitude, Vines and Henslow 

 among botanists, Cunningham among zoologists, have always 

 resisted Weismannism ; but, I think, none was distinctly in- 

 fluenced by Hering and Butler. In America the majority 

 of the great school of palaeontologists have been strong 

 Lamarckians, notably Cope, who has pointed out, moreover, 

 that the transformations of energy in living beings are peculiar 

 to them. 



We have already adverted to Haeckel's acceptance and 

 development of Hering's ideas in his Perigenese der Plastidule. 

 Oscar Hertwig has been a consistent Lamarckian, like Yves 

 Delage of the Sorbonne ; these occupy pre-eminent positions 

 not only as observers but as discriminating theorists and 

 historians of the recent progress of biology. We may also 

 cite as a Lamarckian — of a sort — Felix Le Dantec, the leader of 

 the chemico-physical school in France to-day. 



But we must seek elsewhere for special attention to the 

 points which Butler regarded as the essentials of Life and 

 Habit. In 1893 Henry P. Orr, Professor of Biology in the 

 University of Louisiana, published a little book entitled A 

 Theory of Heredity. Herein he insists on the nervous control 

 of the whole body and on the transmission to the repro- 

 ductive cells of such stimuli, received by the body, as will 

 guide them on their path until they shall have acquired 

 adequate experience of their own in the new body they have 

 formed. I have found the name of neither Butler nor Hering, 

 but the treatment is essentially on their lines and is both 

 clear and interesting. 



In 1896 I wrote an essay on The Fundamental Principles 

 of Heredity, primarily directed to the man in the street. This, 

 after being held over for more than a year by one leading 

 review, was " declined with regret," and again after some 

 weeks met the same fate from another editor. It appeared 

 in the pages of Natural Science for October, 1897, and in the 

 Biologisches Centralblatt for the same year. I reproduce its 

 closing paragraph : 



" This theory [Hering-Butler's] has, indeed, a tentative 

 character, and lacks symmetrical completeness, but is the 

 more welcome as not aiming at the impossible. A whole 

 series of phenomena in organic beings are correlated under the 

 term of memory, conscious and unconscious, patent and latent. . . . 



