30 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Rignano, an engineer keenly interested in all branches of science, 

 and a little later the founder of the international review, " Rivista 

 di Scienza" (now called Sciciitia), published in French a volume 

 entitled De la transmissibilite des Caracteres acquis — HypothesecCune 

 Centro-epigencsc. Into the details of the author's work we will 

 not enter fully. Suffice it to know that he accepts the Hering- 

 Butler theory and makes a distinct advance on Hering's rather 

 crude hypothesis of persistent vibrations by suggesting that the 

 remembering centres store slightly different forms of energy, 

 to give out energy of the same kind as they have received, 

 like electrical accumulators. The last chapter, " Phenomenes 

 mnemoniques Phenomenes vitales," is frankly based on Hering. 



In The Lesson of Evolution (1907, posthumous and only pub- 

 lished for private circulation) Frederick Wollaston Hutton, F.R.S., 

 late Professor of Biology and Geology, first at Dunedin and after 

 at Christchurch, New Zealand, puts forward a strongly vitalistic 

 view and adopts Hering's teaching. After stating this he adds, 

 " The same idea of heredity being due to unconscious memory 

 was advocated by Mr. Samuel Butler in his Life and Habits 



Dr. James Mark Baldwin, Stuart Professor of Psychology 

 in Princeton University, U.S.A., called attention early in the 

 nineties to a reaction characteristic of all living beings, which 

 he terms the " Circular reaction." We take his most recent 

 account of this from his Development and Evohition (1902) : 



" The general fact is that the organism reacts by concen- 

 tration upon the locality stimulated for the contimiance of the 

 conditions, movements, stimulations, which are vitally beneficial^ 

 and for the cessation of the conditions, movements, stimulations 

 which are vitally depressing.^^ ^ 



This amounts to saying in the terminology of Jennings (see 

 below) that the living organism alters its ** physiological states " 

 either for its direct benefit, or for its indirect benefit in the 

 reduction of harmful conditions. 



Again : 



"This form of concentration ot energy on stimulated locali- 



' He says in a note, "This general type ot reaction was described and 

 illustrated in a different connection by Pfluger in Pflnger's Archiv f.d. ges. 

 Physiologie^ Bd. XV." The essay bears the significant title " Die teleologische 

 Mechanik der lebendige Natur," and is a very remarkable one, as coming from an 

 official physiologist in 1877, when the chemico-physical school was nearly at its 

 zenith. 



