362 SYMBIOGENESIS 



already done, which till now had been without explanation. Rudimen- 

 tary organs were no longer a hindrance to our acceptance of design, 

 they became weighty arguments in its favour. 



" Continued personality and memory," according to 

 Butler, "are the elements that constitute experience." He 

 assumes a physical substratum of racial memory (inheritance), 

 and, if this view prove correct, again we may thus see how 

 greatly racial experience and wisdom, powers of will and of 

 mind, must depend on symbiogenetic factors, which determine 

 the quality of physical composition, and thus the health and 

 the longevity of a race. " A race is one long individual living 

 indeed in pulsations, so to speak, but no more losing continued 

 personality by living in successive generations, than an 

 individual loses it by living in consecutive days." He further 

 states that when he wrote Life and Habit, in 1877, " it was not 

 generally seen that though the father is not nourished by the 

 dinners that the son eats, yet the son was fed when the father 

 ate before he begot him." 



I have long been struck by this important truth, which is 

 yet far from being sufficiently realised. I am taking every 

 opportunity, therefore, to emphasize the transcendent 

 importance of ancestral feeding; i.e., of feeding generally in 

 its genetic effects. The food problem is not exhausted, though 

 we have determined the extent to which successive generations 

 are physically fed by the food of their progenitors; it remains 

 still to elucidate the extent to which they are generally deter- 

 mined by ancestral feeding, i.e., as regards psychical, 

 biological, and evolutionary developments. The same 

 injudicious fare that we have seen in the long run to be mainly 

 responsible for "dragging evolution in the mud," is also the 

 bane of genuine mentality and of memory, militating, as it 

 does, against psychological progress. 

 Quin corpus onustum 



Hesternis vitiis animum quoque praegravat una, 

 Atque affigit humo divinae particulam aurae. 

 Butler cites Claude Bernard as saying: " Eien ne nait, 

 rien ne se cree, tout se continue. La nature ne nous offre 



