EXPLANATOEY HYPOTHESES 105 



irritation is offered. If the germ cells of the parent 

 organism are affected, however feebly, by the habits 

 of the body, then the offspring, as it grows, will 

 reproduce the experience it underwent as a smaller 

 part of the body. Therefore it accurately repeats 

 what its ancestors have repeated through innumer- 

 able generations. When the first germ divided, it 

 bequeathed its properties to its descendants : the 

 immediate descendants added new properties, and 

 every new germ reproduced to a great extent the 

 modos operandi of its ancestors. For acquired charac- 

 ters, he says, can be inherited. Each generation 

 endows its germ with some small property w r hich has 

 been acquired during life, and this is added to the 

 total legacy of the race. Thus every organised being 

 of the present day is the product of the unconscious 

 memory of organised matter. 



The same idea of heredity being due to unconscious 

 memory was advocated by Mr. Samuel Butler in his 

 "Life and Habit" (1878). 



Mr. Francis Galton's paper on heredity was pub- 

 lished in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute 

 for 1875 (Vol. v., p. 329). There are, he says, two 

 groups of facts to be accounted for. (1) Congenital 

 peculiarities, and (2) peculiarities acquired for the 

 first time by one or more individuals during their 

 life-time. The sum total of the germs or organic 

 units in the fertilised ovum , he calls the Stirp ; and 

 he supposes that a struggle for existence , and a pro- 

 cess of natural selection , goes on among the organic 

 units, which constitute the Stirp, by means of which 

 some organic units are developed in the young animal 



